Standardised multi-item scales are very common in psychology, education, and health, but much less so in sociology, political science, and survey research.   This one day course is designed to inspire participants from all disciplines that it is possible to develop your own high quality multi-item scales.  This course offers an introduction on how to do this: looking at psychometric principles, exploring the special questionnaire design concerns, introducing some basic statistical tools for assessing the reliability and dimensionality of multi-item scales, and practice evaluating some existing scales in a lab session at the end of the day.

Course Objectives

After this course, participants will:

• Be better at evaluating the quality of existing multi-items scales
• Have knowledge about how to create their own high quality multi-item scales

Target Audience

This course is suitable for people new to multi-item scale creation and evaluation as well as those who have experience using existing multi-item scales, but would like to know more about how to create their own high quality multi-item scales. It would be particularly appropriate for those who anticipate using a multi-item scale in a future survey.  The course stands alone, but participants will benefit from having had a course on questionnaire design. 

Preliminary Reading

• Heath, A. and Martin, J. (1997), Why Are There so Few Formal Measuring Instruments in Social and Political Research? in L. Lyberg, P. Biemer, M. Collins, E. de Leeuw, C. Dippo, N Schwarz, and D. Trewin (eds), Survey Measurement and Process Quality, New York: Wiley