Power Measures

Abstract

The Power Measures battery, developed principally by James C. McCroskey and Virginia P. Richmond alongside foundational contributions from Patricia Kearney and Timothy G. Plax, represents a landmark psychometric and communicative assessment suite designed to quantify power dynamics, social influence, and compliance-gaining mechanisms within educational environments. Rooted in the classic French and Raven sociological taxonomy of interpersonal power bases, the battery operationalizes classroom influence through two primary interconnected instruments: the 22-item Teacher Behavior Alteration Techniques (BATs) scale and the General Power Measures relative-distribution scale. The Teacher BATs instrument assesses student perceptions of specific pedagogical compliance strategies across 22 distinct behavioral alterants—ranging from immediate and deferred intrinsic rewards to institutional legitimate authority, peer modeling, and coercive punishment. The General Power Measures assess students’ proportional allocation of five classic power bases (coercive, reward, legitimate, referent, and expert power) constrained to a cumulative 100 percent distribution, coupled with a single-item global power intensity metric rated from 0 to 9. Psychometric evaluations across secondary and higher education cohorts consistently reveal robust reliability coefficients, with composite subscale Cronbach’s alphas typically spanning 0.76 to 0.91, alongside stable construct, concurrent, and predictive validity regarding cognitive learning, student affective orientation toward instructors, communication apprehension, and resistance behaviors. This article provides a comprehensive psychometric review of the Power Measures, documenting its theoretical framework, structural dimensionality, empirical properties, scoring methodologies, and educational research applications.

Keywords

Power Measures, Behavior Alteration Techniques, BATs, Teacher Power Bases, French and Raven, Instructional Communication, Classroom Management, Compliance-Gaining, Student Affective Learning, Teacher Credibility

Authors

The Power Measures suite and associated Behavior Alteration Techniques were formulated through programmatic scholarship in instructional communication spearheaded by:

• Virginia P. Richmond, Ph.D. — Professor Emerita of Communication Studies at West Virginia University and past President of the Eastern Communication Association. Dr. Richmond is widely recognized for her foundational scholarship on power, nonverbal immediacy, and instructional influence.
• James C. McCroskey, Ed.D. (1938–2012) — Former Chair and Professor of Communication Studies at West Virginia University and the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Dr. McCroskey was one of the most prolifically cited scholars in the communication discipline, pioneering psychometric measurement in communication apprehension, socio-communicative style, and instructional power.
• Patricia Kearney, Ed.D. — Professor Emerita of Communication Studies at California State University, Long Beach, whose research centered on classroom compliance-gaining, teacher misbehaviors, and classroom communication dynamics.
• Timothy G. Plax, Ph.D. (1947–2013) — Former Professor of Communication Studies at California State University, Long Beach, specializing in compliance-gaining typologies, quantitative research design, and organizational power.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Power Measures suite is to systematically assess the nature, distribution, and perceptual impact of teacher power usage and influence strategies in educational settings. In pedagogical environments, instructors continually engage in classroom management and instructional leadership designed to elicit student compliance with cognitive, behavioral, and organizational demands—such as completing assigned readings, participating productively in group discussions, arriving punctually, adhering to safety protocols, and sustaining focused study habits. While traditional pedagogical research historically treated teacher classroom authority as an undifferentiated monolith, the Power Measures paradigm acknowledges that classroom control is fundamentally mediated through communicative transactions and relational perceptions.

From an applied research perspective, the instrument fulfills three crucial objectives:

1. Taxonomic Categorization of Compliance Strategies: The 22 Teacher Behavior Alteration Techniques (BATs) operationalize concrete communicative messages deployed by instructors, allowing educational researchers to catalog precisely which discursive strategies (e.g., altruistic appeals, reward promises, guilt induction, or bureaucratic directives) are actively encountered by students.
2. Macro-Level Sociological Power Profiling: The General Power Measures scale captures students’ holistic structural perceptions of instructor authority by quantifying the relative prevalence of French and Raven’s classic relational power typologies (coercive, reward, legitimate, referent, and expert) in a forced-choice constant-sum format, alongside overall power intensity.
3. Predictive Modeling of Learning Outcomes: The scale enables psychometricians and educational psychologists to empirically model how divergent power enactments correlate with critical pedagogical criteria, including student affective learning, cognitive mastery, state motivation, student empowerment, student incivility, and intentional resistance strategies.

In clinical, teacher preparation, and faculty development settings, the tool serves diagnostic purposes. By benchmarking an instructor’s perceived reliance on prosocial versus antisocial BATs, instructional designers and pedagogical consultants can provide evidence-based interventions to steer educators away from coercive, retaliatory power enactments that induce psychological reactance, fostering instead referent and expert-oriented communication patterns that support student self-determination.

Psychological Construct

The Power Measures suite measures classroom power as a multidimensional, perceptual construct rooted in relational communication theory. Power is conceptualized not as a fixed property possessed exclusively by an authority figure, but as a dynamic relational attribute generated through reciprocal communicative behaviors and perceptual consensus between instructors and learners. The construct encompasses two tightly aligned analytic tiers: specific micro-level influence strategies (Behavior Alteration Techniques) and broad macro-level power orientations (Relational Power Bases).

Micro-Level Behavior Alteration Techniques (BATs)

The 22 BATs represent discrete compliance-gaining message strategies that teachers utilize to guide student behaviors. Empirical investigations categorially cluster these 22 strategies into prosocial and antisocial domains:

• Immediate and Deferred Reward Strategies: Emphasizes internal satisfaction derived from task execution (e.g., BAT 1: Immediate Reward from Behavior; BAT 2: Deferred Reward from Behavior) or tangible pedagogical reinforcement provided by the teacher (BAT 3: Reward from Teacher).
• Extrinsic and Social Reinforcements: Capitalizes on relational standing among external referent groups (BAT 4: Reward from Others; BAT 8: Punishment from Others) or internal self-concept validation (BAT 5: Self-Esteem).
• Punitive and Aversive Enactments: Relies on perceived structural harm, direct academic penalties, or discomfort (BAT 6: Punishment from Behavior; BAT 7: Punishment from Teacher).
• Affective and Relational Leverage: Strategically leverages interpersonal affinity, personal affection, emotional guilt, or conditional relational standing (BAT 9: Guilt; BAT 10: Teacher-Student Relationship: Positive; BAT 11: Teacher-Student Relationship: Negative).
• Institutional and Positional Legitimacy: Invokes institutional hierarchies, formalized codes of conduct, or arbitrary pedagogical authority (BAT 12: Legitimate: Higher Authority; BAT 13: Legitimate: Teacher Authority).
• Normative, Reciprocal, and Civic Obligations: Emphasizes ethical duties, communal interdependence, peer expectations, and democratic norms (BAT 14: Personal Responsibility; BAT 15: Responsibility to Class; BAT 16: Formative Rules; BAT 17: Debt; BAT 18: Altruism).
• Exemplary and Competency Modeling: Relies on normative social imitation, subject-matter expertise, and diagnostic transparency (BAT 19: Peer Modeling; BAT 20: Teacher Modeling; BAT 21: Expert Teacher; BAT 22: Teacher Feedback).

Macro-Level Bases of Teacher Power

The General Power Measures capture the overarching socio-psychological foundations of instructor influence, defined within the instructional domain as:

• Coercive Power: Student expectations of punitive consequences, academic retribution, or public embarrassment if noncompliance occurs.
• Reward Power: Student perception that the instructor controls access to mediated formal benefits, honors, grades, or personal accommodations.
• Legitimate Power: Student internalization of the instructor’s institutional right to dictate expectations simply by virtue of professional status or occupational title.
• Referent Power: Student identification with, personal liking for, and psychological attraction toward the instructor, prompting voluntary compliance without direct solicitation.
• Expert Power: Student attribution of scholarly expertise, specialized knowledge, pedagogical competence, and intellectual mastery to the instructor.

Theoretical Framework

The conceptual framework uniting the Power Measures integrates John R. P. French and Bertram Raven’s (1959) seminal social power bases with Gerald R. Miller’s compliance-gaining paradigm and Self-Determination Theory. French and Raven posited that social influence within any interpersonal dyad or organizational hierarchy derives from distinct psychological resources held by an agent relative to a target’s perceptions. When transposed into instructional environments by McCroskey, Richmond, Kearney, and Plax, power ceased to be viewed merely as an administrative sanction; it became an ongoing, discursively constructed phenomenon.

Under this theoretical model, power enactments operate across a continuum of internalization. Grounded in Herbert Kelman’s (1958) processes of opinion change—compliance, identification, and internalization—the Power Measures capture distinct mechanisms of behavioral adaptation:

• Compliance Processes: Driven by Coercive, Reward, and Positional Legitimate power bases, as well as antisocial BATs (such as Teacher Punishment, Negative Relationship, and Teacher Authority). Here, student behavior change is public, shallow, and sustained only under direct instructor surveillance.
• Identification Processes: Driven by Referent Power and relational BATs (Positive Relationship, Peer Modeling). The student conforms to establish or maintain a gratifying psychological connection with the admired teacher.
• Internalization Processes: Driven by Expert Power and intrinsic BATs (Deferred Reward, Immediate Reward, Teacher Feedback, Altruism). The student adopts the requested behavior because its underlying rationale aligns with their personal values, intellectual growth, and self-congruent motivations.

Furthermore, the theoretical framework incorporates Jack Brehm’s Psychological Reactance Theory (1966). When teachers rely disproportionately on heavy-handed coercive strategies or arbitrary authoritarian appeals (e.g., BAT 13: “Because I told you to”), students perceive an overt threat to their personal autonomy. This perception elicits emotional hostility, diminished affect for the subject matter, and active or passive student resistance. Conversely, instructors who emphasize referent, expert, and prosocial techniques minimize reactance and foster heightened cognitive engagement and self-regulated learning.

Validity

The construct, convergent, criterion-related, and discriminant validity of the Power Measures have been extensively corroborated across hundreds of secondary, undergraduate, and graduate classroom samples over four decades.

Construct and Convergent Validity

Construct validity is evidenced through robust correlations with established instructional and interpersonal communication scales. Factor analytic investigations demonstrate that the 22 BATs consistently separate into two overarching meta-constructs: Prosocial BATs (e.g., Immediate Reward, Self-Esteem, Altruism, Expert Teacher) and Antisocial BATs (e.g., Teacher Punishment, Guilt, Negative Relationship, Teacher Authority). Prosocial BATs demonstrate significant positive correlations with teacher nonverbal immediacy scales ($r = .45$ to $.65$, $p < .001$), source credibility dimensions of competence, character, and caring ($r = .40$ to $.60$, $p < .001$), and perceived teacher clarity. Conversely, Antisocial BATs correlate positively with perceived teacher misbehaviors (incompetence, indolence, offensiveness;$r = .35$ to $.55$) and student state communication apprehension.

Criterion-Related and Predictive Validity

Predictive validity research has repeatedly confirmed that the distribution of teacher power bases and BAT usage patterns accounts for substantial variance in student educational outcomes:

• Affective Learning: Multiple regression analyses reveal that instructor use of Referent power, Expert power, and prosocial BATs accounts for 30% to 50% of the variance in students’ affective orientation toward the course instructor, content, and recommended behaviors ($R^2 = .32$ to $.51$, $p < .001$). Coercive and antisocial BATs consistently serve as negative predictors of affect.
• Cognitive Learning: While direct correlations with standardized objective test scores are modest, perceived cognitive learning displays moderate-to-strong positive associations with teacher referent and expert power distributions ($r = .35$ to $.48$).
• Student Resistance Strategies: Validational studies by Kearney, Plax, and Burroughs demonstrated that students report significantly higher willingness to utilize constructive, non-subversive resistance when teachers employ prosocial BATs, whereas antisocial, coercive BATs elicit passive-aggressive defiance, deception, and classroom disruption.

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity analyses confirm that the General Power Measures successfully isolate power dynamics from general instructor popularity or halo effects. Constant-sum allocations among the five bases show that referent and expert power retain distinct factor structures and load independently from general grading leniency or sociability metrics.

Reliability

The psychometric reliability of the Power Measures battery has been documented across numerous laboratory and field studies. Because the battery encompasses two distinct measurement paradigms—the 22-item frequency-rated BATs inventory and the constant-sum General Power Measures—reliability is evaluated through composite internal consistency, subscale stability, and test-retest indices.

Internal Consistency (Cronbach’s Alpha)

When evaluated as aggregated prosocial and antisocial composite dimensions, the Teacher BATs scale yields exemplary internal consistency estimates:

• Prosocial BATs Composite: Cronbach’s $\alpha$ coefficients typically range from .83 to .91 across diverse educational levels.
• Antisocial BATs Composite: Cronbach’s $\alpha$ coefficients consistently fall between .78 and .88.
• Individual Subscale Reliability: When individual BAT dimensions are measured via multi-item extended variants (such as the 3-item-per-BAT expanded format developed by Kearney et al.), subscale internal reliabilities range from .72 to .89.

Stability and Test-Retest Reliability

Test-retest assessments conducted across two-to-three-week intervals during stable mid-semester instructional periods demonstrate acceptable temporal stability. Correlation coefficients for the BAT frequency ratings range from $r_{tt} = .71$ to $.84$. In the General Power Measures, the constant-sum percentages demonstrate test-retest correlations spanning $r = .68$ to $.79$ for expert, referent, and legitimate bases, while coercive power distributions demonstrate high stability ($r = .82$), indicating consistent student perceptions of instructor disciplinary orientation.

Factor Analysis

The underlying factor structure of the Teacher Behavior Alteration Techniques has been evaluated using both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) across diverse instructional datasets.

Exploratory Factor Analyses (EFA)

Initial principal components and principal axis factoring using orthogonal (Varimax) and oblique (Promax) rotations on the 22 BAT frequency scores consistently extract two robust higher-order factors accounting for approximately 42% to 54% of the total variance:

• Factor 1: Prosocial Alteration Techniques (Eigenvalues typically > 5.0): High primary factor loadings ($lambda > .50$) are found for Immediate Reward from Behavior, Deferred Reward from Behavior, Self-Esteem, Altruism, Expert Teacher, Teacher Feedback, and Personal (Student) Responsibility. Cross-loadings on the antisocial factor remain low ($lambda < .25$).
• Factor 2: Antisocial Alteration Techniques (Eigenvalues typically > 3.0): Strong primary factor loadings ($lambda > .50$) characterize Punishment from Behavior, Punishment from Teacher, Punishment from Others, Guilt, Teacher-Student Relationship: Negative, Legitimate: Teacher Authority, and Debt.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Structural equation modeling and CFA evaluations testing the hypothesized two-factor higher-order model (Prosocial vs. Antisocial) against unidimensional and orthogonal multi-factor alternatives confirm superior fit for the correlated two-factor construct:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): .91 to .94
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): .90 to .93
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): .048 to .062 (90% CI [.041, .069])
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): .051

These empirical indices confirm that while the 22 BATs represent qualitatively distinct message strategies, they converge systematically around dual motivational valences: developmental reinforcement (prosocial) versus coercive compliance (antisocial).

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The Power Measures suite comprises two standalone, complementary assessment tools designed for instructional contexts:

Test Format and Administration

• Assessment Type: Observer-rating / Student-report perceptual survey. Can be adapted for teacher self-report.
• Target Population: Secondary, undergraduate, and post-graduate students assessing a targeted course instructor.
• Completion Time: Approximately 10 to 15 minutes.
• Structure:
  • Part 1: Teacher Behavior Alteration Techniques (BATs): 22 items representing distinct compliance strategies.
  • Part 2: General Power Measures: A 5-item constant-sum percentage distribution (coercive, reward, legitimate, referent, expert summing to 100%) followed by a 1-item 10-point global power usage scale (0 to 9).

Response Scale and Scoring Rules

• Teacher BATs Protocol: Utilizes a two-stage sequential gating response format:
  • Step 1 (Incidence): The respondent identifies whether the teacher has ever used the strategy: YES or NO.
  • Step 2 (Frequency): If YES, the respondent rates the frequency using a 4-point metric:
    • 1 = Rarely
    • 2 = Occasionally
    • 3 = Often
    • 4 = Very Often

    (If NO is selected, the item is scored as 0 for frequency analyses).

• BATs Composite Scoring:
  • Prosocial BATs Composite: Sum or mean of items 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 14, 15, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21, and 22. Higher scores indicate greater exposure to developmental, non-punitive compliance strategies.
  • Antisocial BATs Composite: Sum or mean of items 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, and 17. Higher scores reflect perceived authoritarian, coercive, or guilt-inducing teacher influence.
• General Power Measures Scoring:
  • Respondents distribute 100 points across the five power bases. Each assigned value directly represents the perceived percentage share of that power type ($0% – 100%$; sum must equal exactly 100).
  • Global power intensity is scored directly on an anchored single-item continuum from 0 (“teacher does not make any attempt to exercise power in the class”) to 9 (“teacher uses more power than many other teachers you have had”).

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The core Power Measures and Behavior Alteration Techniques scales were developed and refined between 1983 and 2001 by Virginia P. Richmond, James C. McCroskey, Patricia Kearney, and Timothy G. Plax. In accordance with the scholarly mission of Dr. James C. McCroskey and Dr. Virginia P. Richmond, these instruments are placed in the public domain for research, instructional, and educational assessment purposes. No fees or formal royalty payments are required for academic, scholarly, or classroom non-commercial usage. Researchers and evaluators utilizing the scale are required to maintain appropriate scholarly attribution by citing the original validation publications in their reports and publications.

References

• French, J. R. P., & Raven, B. (1959). The bases of social power. In D. Cartwright (Ed.), Studies in social power (pp. 150–167). University of Michigan Press. https://www.worldcat.org/title/studies-in-social-power/oclc/169129
• Kearney, P., Plax, T. G., Richmond, V. P., & McCroskey, J. C. (1984). Power in the classroom IV: Alternatives to teacher dominance. Communication Education, 33(1), 43–55. https://doi.org/10.1080/03634528409384713
• Kearney, P., Plax, T. G., Richmond, V. P., & McCroskey, J. C. (1985). Power in the classroom V: Behavior alteration techniques to obtain student compliance. Communication Education, 34(3), 214–226. https://doi.org/10.1080/03634528509378609
• McCroskey, J. C., & Richmond, V. P. (1983). Power in the classroom I: Teacher and student perceptions. Communication Education, 32(2), 175–184. https://doi.org/10.1080/03634528309378527
• Plax, T. G., Kearney, P., McCroskey, J. C., & Richmond, V. P. (1986). Power in the classroom VI: Verbal control strategies, nonverbal immediacy and affective learning. Communication Education, 35(1), 43–55. https://doi.org/10.1080/03634528609388318
• Richmond, V. P., & McCroskey, J. C. (1984). Power in the classroom II: Power and learning. Communication Education, 33(2), 125–136. https://doi.org/10.1080/03634528409384729
• Richmond, V. P., & McCroskey, J. C. (2001). Organizational communication for survival: Making work, work (2nd ed.). Allyn & Bacon.
• Richmond, V. P., McCroskey, J. C., Kearney, P., & Plax, T. G. (1987). Power in the classroom VII: Linking complementary teacher perceptions of power with student learning. Communication Education, 36(1), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1080/03634528709378637

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)