Thursday, February 10, 2011

Survey Design

I'm working on a retrospective pre-post competency survey, and needed to be reminded of some basics of survey design again.

I find Neuman's chapter about survey design a good foundation: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0205457932.

Jane Davidson Makes some compelling arguments that suggest that we do need to think twice when we decide to make use of Likert type scales in surveys. http://genuineevaluation.com/breaking-out-of-the-likert-scale-trap/
She sugggests that rather than use the "strongly agree / disagree" type anchors, one could use evaluative terms like "inadequate / good" that might make the data easier to interpret.


Ive also found a list of possible Likert Scale Anchors that are most useful:
http://www.hehd.clemson.edu/prtm/trmcenter/scale.pdf