Survey Scales: A Guide to Development, Analysis, and Reporting

289 Pages·2016·5.52 MB·English

by  Robert L. Johnson PhD

ebook
THE GUILFORD PRESS
Survey ScaleS
Also Available
Assessing Performance:
Designing, Scoring, and Validating
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Robert L. Johnson, James A. Penny,
and Belita Gordon
Survey
ScaleS
A Guide to Development, Analysis,
and Reporting
RobeRt L. Johnson
GRAnt b. MoRGAn
the GUILFoRD PRess
new York London
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To our families

Mildred and Walter, my parents
Judy, Jerri, and Jeannie, my sisters
Richard, my partner
—R. L. J.
Olivia, my daughter
Jessica, my wife
Cheryl, my mom
—G. B. M.

Preface
When you opened this book, you probably were looking for the answers to
some questions, such as:
• “When I am writing items, how do I ensure the items are targeting
the focus of my research?”
• “If I use a few items from another researcher’s scale, do I need to
obtain copyright permission to use the items?”
• “How do I decide which items are ‘good’ and which are ‘problem-
atic’?”
• “Should the scales on the items be 4-point, 5-point, or more?”
• “Should each scale point have a label?”
• “How do I investigate the reliability and validity associated with the
survey scale?”
We wrote Survey Scales: A Guide to Development, Analysis, and Report-
ing to answer these questions (and some others). We also wrote it to pro-
vide a resource for those in research and program evaluation who plan to
develop scales for use in surveys by explaining such topics as:
• Reviewing existing scales for use in a study,
• Designing a framework to guide scale development,
• Writing items,
vii
viii Preface
• Developing item response scales,
• Examining validity and reliability,
• Conducting a factor analysis,
• Analyzing data, and
• Reporting scale results.
In Survey Scales, we synthesize the literature from the survey and mea-
surement fields. The book is grounded in our research and experience in
conducting surveys, as well as feedback from our students in the survey
design courses we’ve taught. Since the literature on scale development is
not always consistent in its guidance on design, Survey Scales is written
to help readers select the appropriate methodology or approach to use and
understand why such methods or approaches are appropriate. Rather than
focus on a single discipline, we draw examples from various professional
fields, such as education, psychology, and public health.
Survey Scales is applied in that it is a resource for those who plan to
use survey scales in a research study or an evaluation. It will be of interest
to practitioners who are planning a survey as well as to doctoral students
who are developing surveys to use in data collection for their dissertations.
We begin at the first step in scale development and end with analyzing data
and reporting results, so it may be helpful for first-time readers to take the
chapters in sequence. We purposely ordered the chapters in such a way that
scale developers will have food for thought and guidance for each step of
the development process.
Researchers may find the coverage of frameworks for scale develop-
ment (Chapter 3) particularly useful because this is an area that is not com-
monly addressed in other texts. We have carefully presented the informa-
tion so that readers can follow and begin creating their own frameworks
for scale development. Having such a framework is an excellent way to
identify the critical components of an instrument and ensure that desired
elements are included in the scale.
For those readers who may have an existing instrument in mind, we
have also included a chapter on adopting or adapting existing scales (Chap-
ter 2). In this chapter, we present criteria for determining whether a preex-
isting scale is likely to provide data of an appropriate quality for a research
study or program evaluation. Readers are introduced to the Mental Mea-
surements Yearbook, a resource that provides critiques of measurement
tools, such as attitude scales. Chapter 2 also provides guidance on the use
of journal articles to find information about the technical quality of scales.
In addition, we provide guidance on the extent to which a researcher can
appropriately incorporate items or sections of a survey scale into his or her
scale and on the need to obtain permission to use copyrighted scales.