Topic: What did you learn about the process of creating surveys and the social validation component for creating individual items on the instrument?
By knowing my research title of “teaching through the new technology of instruction to the life of the learner”, I initially had three paths to take either the survey to be given to the refugees already in the USA through Catholic Charities or do my research directly involving the refugee camps or directing the survey through the UNHCR offices. Having to deal with vulnerable people, and the impact of getting the approval and the delays this will have going forward with the survey I then decided to directly communicate with the UNHCR offices or worse come to worse go through the previous refugee research that is reliable and carry forward my research.
Also, as the response rate is an important indicator of survey research success (Robson, McCartan, 2011) and having to deal with a large population of vulnerable people I felt the decision of going forward directly to the offices was a stepping one step forward with my research. Browsing through previous surveys on the above title I only retrieved one survey article but by then I had already created ten questions for my survey. I was not lucky as most research surveys created before were directing towards the refugee population and not towards any training needs.
The validation being how accurate the survey being measured against what is trying to be measured. The social validation component for the survey matched the construct validity where the questions can generalize about the construct of interest and to accurately measure the construct (Flipp,2014)
What surprised you?
The initial process of using Qualtrics with a free account acceptable for 15 questions as the requirement was a good experience especially the creating numerical scales, not knowing the system but playing around to get what you really wanted to achieve was a challenging experience, the other was to export according to the required guidelines. My second attempt for the increase of survey questions by 5 more was even more challenging as informed in the class I had to go through UNT to gain access to the account and re-do the survey questions again but at the previous attempt realized that all questions can be copied and adjusted to my requirement which was a quick entry of the old date to the new survey data. Due to synthesize my research questions before trying the Qualtrics was an advantage as it was just entering the data into the system and receiving the output. With the requirement of the word document for submission, I learned one more step with the second attempt of creating and going through the additional survey questions.
What takes the longest in developing surveys as you have experienced it in class and as you develop your own for next week.
What takes the longest in developing surveys as you have experienced it in class and as you develop your own for next week. Synthesize the research questions takes a longer time, you need to know what your requirement and what you expect to achieve from the survey. It is a continuous process of knowing what you want and reaching to achieve the results. The survey that takes the longest to create is that allows multiple items to elicit a single response which is a category scale.
References
Robson, C., McCartan, K. (2011) Real world research – fourth edition
Flipp, C. (2014) Reliability & Validity https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ltvDNAsO-I
Blogs 