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For more than two decades, listening researchers have published untested inventories designed to help users assess their perceived listening effectiveness (Vining and Yrle; Steil, Barker, and Watson; Brownell, Building; Freshour; Anderson; Bennett and Wood; Glenn and Pood; Johnson and Pearce). Driven by interest and inquiries from organizational executives and trainers as well as from academic instructors, the authors of these inventories attempted to provide an instrument to help those in the workplace-managers in particular-quickly review their listening effectiveness. The aim was to get individuals into listening training programs if they did not listen proficiently enough to function effectively in their daily job duties.
So that managers and others could be more certain of the results after seeing their scores on an inventory, we set out to construct a valid and reliable instrument to assess perceived listening effectiveness. The instrument that we revised-the Listening Styles Inventory (LSI)-has been used extensively during the ensuing years (Barker, Pearce, and Johnson, "Investigation"; see also Barker, Pearce, and Johnson, "Validity"). (The LSI is included in the appendix.) In fact, executives, trainers, and teachers began to use the LSI for just the purposes researchers had been proposing for some time. Concurrent to our own research and without our knowledge, other researchers also recognized the need for a valid and reliable inventory such as the LSI. Two other instruments were designed during the time we were working on this one (Cooper and Husband; Watson, Barker, and Weaver), and we discuss these instruments later in this article. All these instruments, including ours, test users' perceptions about their listening abilities, not their actual listening comprehension. Therefore, the instrument's function is to raise users' awareness of these perceptions so that they can take appropriate action, if necessary, to improve their listening skills. A common action is to enroll in a listening training program where listening comprehension tests are often used. Listening comprehension tests typically take several hours to administer and are not practical for use in the workplace beyond the training classroom; therefore, instruments such as the LSI serve a critical niche that would go unserved otherwise.
Realizing that the LSI would be even more useful if we offered users information about how people with backgrounds similar to their own performed on the inventory,...