07 Jul creating survey questions discussions
Survey Question Development and Choice of Validated Measures Instructions
One of the main course objectives in this course is to generate and analyze new data related to a specific domain through the conduct of original research. This may also be one of the more exciting things we will work on together, so we hope you will enjoy this experience.
Background on Research Questions, Hypotheses, Validated Measures, and Survey Questions
We will use this discussion forum to develop and submit survey questions to practice developing, administering, and analyzing the results from a cross-sectional survey. In addition, as part of this discussion, you will search for validated measures of a health topic of interest.
Validated measures are typically surveyed instruments, or sets of survey questions, that have been tested to ensure that they measure the item or concept of interest accurately and reliably.
Before you can begin searching for validated measures to inform writing the actual survey questions, you need to:
- Develop an overall research question of interest (Note: We are somewhat limited in the scope of the question because it should be something that can be addressed in a cross-sectional survey of fellow students. Please avoid highly sensitive questions and anything that would ask students to self-disclose illegal behavior.) but do keep questions within the general realm of health or health behavior.
- Develop a directional hypothesis, and
- Specify the predictor and outcome variables.
Let’s review the following example that demonstrates this process.
Critical Thinking Question: Finding Validated Measures, Instruments, and Survey Questions
Let’s say you are interested in the extent to which someone experiences discrimination in health care settings and self-reported measures of stress (this is the overall research question). Because of your BBH coursework and your own studies, you hypothesize that people who report experiencing more discrimination in health care settings will also report higher stress (this is the directional hypothesis).
Check yourself! Can you identify 1) the predictor, 2) the outcome, and 3) the direction of the hypothesis based on this example? Try to answer the question before checking the answer. Note, you will not need to submit anything here.
Other Researchers and Validated Measures
At this point, you may be wondering, have other researchers investigated similar questions? Have they developed and tested specific survey questions? You could now do a library and/or internet search for validated measures of your predictor and outcome variables, discrimination, and perceived stress, respectively.
In doing so, you would discover that indeed, others have explored these topics and developed surveys with validated measures and scales (several questions that ask about a single concept).
The website, is just one resource where you can start that discusses validated measures and includes many examples.
Note that some measures on this site arent necessarily relevant to the types of relationships we can investigate in the class survey, nevertheless, they can give you some good examples to study this concept, overall. When you spend time reviewing this source, youll also find many links to the research that has been conducted to validate these measures. See if you can find some examples.
Specifically, with regard to the example hypothesis and corresponding survey questions mentioned in this assignment, you can see that both discrimination in healthcare and stress/allostatic load are domains of research on this site. Take a few minutes to review the site and find the:
- Everyday Discrimination Scale (Williams, 2012) (This is located under the Discrimination in Healthcare section. Then go to The Original and Still Recommended Scale section (page 2) to see recommended questions and response options), and
- Global Measure of Perceived Stress Scale (Cohenm Kamarack, and Mermelstein, 1983) under the Stress section. This article is a bit older; be sure that you scroll through to the end, Appendix A, to see the survey questions. Note: If this article is not available for you on the Validated Measures website, please use the direct link to the article.
Validated Measures and Your Own Variables
As you compare the validated measures to the questions you developed, you might decide that you think using validated measures or questions would provide better data. Many validated measures and scales include LOTS of individual questions. Why do you think that may be the case?
For the purpose of this assignment, please identify validated measures for your variables. If the validated measures include many questions (more than 5 or so) choose just a few questions from the overall scale that you would like to include in the course survey.
Please be sure to follow the Discussion Guidelines and Policies in the Student Resource module, which includes information related to:
- discussion guidelines and policies for engaging in class discussions,
- posting to discussions,
- responding to peers, and
- grading criteria.
Discussion Questions
For this discussion, you need to complete the following steps for your initial post:
- Step 1: At the top of each post, in all caps, provide a subject heading that identifies the topic of your question based on the following topics. For the example that was provided earlier, we would use the subject heading: STRESS.
- STRESS,
- Step 2: A statement of your hypothesis, phrased as a complete sentence. It should mention both your predictor variable and your outcome variable, but it should not say the word “predictor” or “outcome” in the sentence. It should use grammatical structure to make it clear which factor you think is likely to influence which potential result. Similarly, make it clear if you hypothesize a direct or inverse associationagain don’t use those words, but make it clear.
- Step 3: A well-crafted survey question that measures your predictor variable. Keeping it simple is OK, but be sure to follow the guidelines in the lesson related to avoiding problems in survey questions.
- Step 4: A well-crafted survey question that measures your outcome variable. Keeping it simple is OK, but be sure to follow the guidelines in the lesson related to avoiding problems in survey questions.
- Step 5: A summary of what happened when you searched the literature for validated measures of your predictor. Use references and citations, as appropriate.
- Step 6: A summary of what happened when you searched the literature for validated measures of your outcome. Use references and citations, as appropriate.
- Step 7: Your choice of validated survey questions to measure the predictor variable, if you were able to identify validated measures.
- Step 8: Your choice of validated survey questions to measure the outcome variable. It is acceptable to use validated measures/questions word for word from the source, but indicate that you are doing so.
Remember to provide complete references to all sources discussed in your post.
