Availability and use of Records for decision making in the Church of Nigeria (Anglican Communion).

Abstract

Abstract Records provide evidence of policies and support decision-making in an organisation. This study examined the use of records for decision-making in the Church of Nigeria (Anglican Communion). Survey design of the ex-post facto type was used and premised on the records life cycle model. Stratified sampling technique was adopted to select seven (7) provinces out of 14, random sampling technique was used to select 720 administrative priests and this was followed by disproportionate random sampling technique to select 50% of them. This gave a total of 360 respondents. A questionnaire placed on a 2-point Likert scale of disagree and agree, and tagged the Church Decision-making Questionnaire (CDMQ) (r=0.89) was the main instrument used for data collection. A total of 347 copies of useable questionnaire were retrieved. This represents 96.39% response rate. Analysis was done using descriptive statistics and multiple regression at 0.05 level of significance. Findings show that, there was significant positive relationship between records use (r = 0.45), and decision-making. The joint influence of the use of records on decision-making {R = 0.47} accounted for 20.9% of the total variance in the church’s decision-making (F (4, 431) = 29.68). Thus, the use of records (β = 0.42; t = 8.92) was found to have a significant influence on decision making. Further, it was also found that, there was no significant difference among the provinces in their levels of records’ use for decision-making (F(7, 428) = 1.06; p>0.05). Consequently. It was concluded that, the use of records had great influence on decision making.