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BOOTSTRAPPING: THE EFFECTS OF FEEDBACK IN AN OBSTETRIC DECISION CONTEXT
Abstract
The purpose of the present study was to investigate the effects of feedback on bootstrapped decisions in a natural setting. Ten obstetric nurses from St. Elizabeth Community Health Center and ten graduate students enrolled in the Psychology Department at the University of Nebraska served as expert and novice decision makers, respectively. A correlational analysis provided veridical rankings for each of 41 community attitude survey items' relationship to hospitalization length. To obtain subjective rankings, both experts and novices rated the importance of the survey items to the criterion. Based on the veridical and subjective rankings, the experimenter then prepared obstetric profiles from 12 randomly selected surveys. In a split-plot design both experts and novices were randomly selected to one of two feedback conditions. Subjects' task during the judgment phase of the study was to predict the number of days obstetric patients were hospitalized for the delivery of their babies on the basis of eight cues. Half of the subjects received outcome feedback after each of their predictions, while the remaining half received no feedback information. Least squares regression weights were used to construct subjects' response systems (e.g. bootstrapped models) and the environmental system (e.g. optimal linear model). Using the lens model approach, the results were that feedback produced significant expertise differences in subjects' bootstrapped judgments (p $\approx$.05), in the incremental validity of the model over human judgments (p $<$.05) and in subjects' response matching (p $\approx$.05). On each of these measures, feedback had a detrimental effect on novices' performance, while having virtually no effect on experts' performance. Edgell's hypothesis that professional decision makers may obtain "blinders" in processing information was supported. Implications of these findings to other professional decision making contexts were discussed.
Subject Area
Psychology|Experiments
Recommended Citation
KLUSMAN, PATRICIA M, "BOOTSTRAPPING: THE EFFECTS OF FEEDBACK IN AN OBSTETRIC DECISION CONTEXT" (1987). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI8722407.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI8722407