The Validity and Analysis of Absenteeism Data: Some Methodological Issues

During a research project in a large Western Australian organisation, a survey

examining various attitudes and behaviours was conducted. Absenteeism was one of
the behaviours of interest and respondents were asked to indicate the total number of
sick days they had taken during the previous twelve months. The researchers were
also provided with absence data relating to the whole organisation for the relevant
period. Many respondents voluntarily provided their distinct staff numbers, which
enabled a direct comparison to be made between their self-reported measures and
their absenteeism according to the organisational records.
When the self-reported measure was regressed on data extracted from organisational
records, approximately 37.4% of variance was explained. Error, however, was not
normally distributed (Kolmogorov-Smirnov z = 5.60, p<.001), with both skewness
(6.47) and kurtosis (70.24) being well outside generally-accepted limits. These results
suggested that the variables (which themselves were highly skewed, leptokurtic and
truncated at the lower end) needed to be transformed if linear regression was to be
employed as an analytical tool. A transformation that would reduce the skewness and
kurtosis of both variables seemed likely to be required, so square root transformations
were employed. Regression using the transformed variables explained 48.1% of
variance. The error term still was non-normally distributed (z = 3.20, p<.001), but
both the skewness (2.92) and kurtosis (19.49) were markedly reduced. Clearly, the
transformations had improved the effectiveness of linear regression as an analytical
tool for these data.
Several inferences flowed from these analyses. First, it seemed that the validity of
self-reported data may not have been particularly high, given that only around 50% of
the variance in the measures was common. Secondly, it appeared that many
correlational analyses which involved raw absenteeism data may, as a consequence of
the distribution of the data, have underestimated the strengths of associations between
absenteeism and other constructs. If self-reported measures, rather than organisational
records, were employed, it was possible that this problem may have been exacerbated.
To test these inferences, regressions of both raw and transformed organisational and
self-reported absenteeism data on a number of other constructs were performed. The
results of these analyses strongly supported the propositions advanced above. This
paper concludes that many of the studies that have failed to find theoreticallypredicted links between absenteeism and other constructs may have failed not because
the theory was flawed, but because the measures employed were flawed, the methods
of analysis used were inappropriate, or both.