[ Abstract ]


Development of Expertise Rating Scale
for Hairdesigner
- Focusing on the NCS Education
& Training Curriculum -

Kee-Bong Lee

Department of Fusion Engineering, the Graduate School
Hoseo University
Asan, Korea

(Supervised by professor Young-Hee Kim)

This study aimed to develop scales to improve expertise of hair designers which would help this occupation, hair designer, to strengthen its position as a more professional job. In the light of that, through the theoretical review, the study first set up concepts, an intermediate range and a subordinate range of hair designers’ expertise and carried out a research on validity of the hair designers’ expertise practice model which had been established in such deductive practice method. Research findings and expected effects of the assessment scales are summarized as follows.
First, the study conducted two different processes to know the validity of how concepts of expertise, the intermediate range and the subordinate range were set up, and the results turned out to be very much positive.
Second, an in-depth theoretical investigation on a (general) education and training course offered by NCS targeting beauty designers was first carried out and as reflecting the results of an intense discussion on the hair designers’ expertise assessment questions (in the draft), the study conducted Delphi survey and verified the validity. The study eventually came up with the hair designers’ expertise assessment scales in preparation for the preliminary research.
Third, regarding the reliability and correlations of one question with another and with the whole, what the preliminary research found out is, except for a few of the questions, the others presented all the positive results, and that made the study try an exploratory factor analysis which offered 12 questions that were wrongly categorized or that presented outliers. A secondary factor analysis was accordingly carried out and as a result, an outcome to correspond to the factor structure which the researcher had temporarily set up was gained.
Fourth, as obtained from the preliminary research, this study earned positive results from all of the questions in connection with the reliability and the correlations of one question with another and with the whole and as a result, an outcome to agree to the factor structure which the researchers had established was presented. In the light of that, to prove the high-order factor structure model merely for confirmation on the factor structure which the researcher had set up, the study conducted a four-stage process of verification with each of the factors applied by stage. The study consequently learned that the model’s goodness of fit keeps increasing with the factors which the researcher had temporarily established added and finally, it produced an outcome to accord with the hair designers’ expertise practice model which the researcher had set up.
As the expertise assessment scales targeting hair designers which had overcome this limit that these expertise assessments made of comprehensive and overlapping contents would have by borrowing expertise assessment scales that are being used not in the field of hair and beauty but other fields, the assessment scales of this study faithfully reflected needs from the hair and beauty field which is looking for personnel of advanced professionalism more desperately than before and therefore, the study assumes that in relation to other researches on expertise in the field of hair and beauty, its assessment scales can be used as a tool to extract more accurate and objective research results compared to these in the past.
In the meantime, even regarding an assessment method as well, since a self-rating was accepted, hair designers are given chances for self-evaluation all the time which would lead to self-reflection and more efficient improvement in expertise. Not only that, the study also argues that since objective expertise assessment but not this subjective one by superiors in the past is more likely to be carried out, a rational class system will be more possibly established in a hair salon.