Survey Evaluation Methods

In this course, we emphasize the cognitive interview. This page explores the space of possibilities.

Approaches to survey evaluation

  • Expert Review
  • Focus groups
  • Cognitive Interview
  • Pretesting
    • Interview pretest
    • Self-administered pretest
    • Software debugging
    • Analysis checks and validation

Analysis checks

After collecting data, some analysis can inidicate problems with the survey.

  • Cronbach alpha on questions addressing the same construct
  • Review of descriptive statistics --- consider outliers
  • Scatter plots of related questions

Sample analysis on the course participation survey --- what problems are revealed?

Discussion questions

  • Which methods involve data collection (empirical) from participants?
  • Are there additional approaches or variants?
  • Do some approaches address different goals?