E3 Questionnaire development

If you have really spent some time and effort in developing your questionnaire measure, then include at this stage a subsection to describe this process. Describe the nature, number and origin of the original set of items and questions. Did you obtain them from measures used elsewhere or make them up yourself? What principles guided you in choosing or creating the items? Describe who you gave this initial measure to and how many of these people there were. Describe any analyses and their outcomes, and any changes that you made to the measure in the light of this. However, describe the final version of the questionnaire as used in the experiment in the MATERIALS (see Section E4 of this Web site).

If this becomes a quite lengthy section, you should think about subsectioning it further or even writing it up as an initial study prior to the study proper. This initial study would have a RESULTS as well as a METHOD and perhaps even a brief INTRODUCTION and DISCUSSION.

As you are developing a new measure, issues of the validity and reliability of this new measure arise. Does it measure what you want it to measure? How do you know? Does it measure consistently on different occasions of use? Of course, with all the measures that we use as DVs in our studies we need to consider whether they are measuring what we think they are measuring. Far too often we simply assume that they measure the construct that we are interested in just because they look like they do. This is to rely on face validity and is highly dubious. In student experiments you may not be in a position to do much by way of assessing statistically the validity and reliability of any measures that you develop. However, this does not excuse you from thinking about these issues. Measures that are invalid or unreliable are useless. So, when developing your questionnaire, read up on issues to do with the different types of validity and reliability and take any reasonable steps that you can to assess these features of your new measure. Unless you have been able to assess these things adequately, be sure to bear in mind the possibility that your measure(s) may be invalid or unreliable when discussing the findings of the experiment proper in the DISCUSSION. You can find out more about these issues in Section E9 of this Web site.