Assessing Age Diversity in Municipal Departments: New Count-Based Indices of Diversity

Salomon Alcocer GUAJARDO

Keywords

Diversity, Gleason index, Margalef index, OLS regression, Simpson index

Abstract

This article proposed two new count-based indices of diversity to assess qualitative demographic (or social) heterogeneity in public organizations: $∆=\frac{\sum _{}^{}k-1}{\ln \sqrt{N}}$ and $∆=\frac{\ln \sum _{}^{}k}{\ln \sqrt{N}}$ . The construct validity and reliability assessments focused exclusively on the unstandardized and standardized scores for age diversity obtained by Δ. The assessments indicated that Δ assesses the same dimension of age diversity as the Gleason, Margalef, Menhinick, and Simpson indices. Additionally, the analyses indicated that Δ possesses the same degree of discriminatory power to detect subtle differences in age diversity as the count- and logarithm-based indices. When the unstandardized and standardized Δ scores were regressed on twelve organizational-based predictors, the ordinary least squares (OLS) regression analysis found more significant statistical relationships amongst the predictors and the Δ scores than the analyses performed on unstandardized and standardized Simpson scores. The OLS regression models for the Δ scores accounted for 45% and 50% of the explained variance, while the models for the Simpson scores accounted for 40% of the explained variance.