Stage fright is a natural and very common phenomenon that affects everyone who must present themselves in public. However, it has a negative impact on the health and voice emission of children and adolescents, which is why it is important to study and measure it. Unfortunately, there are no appropriate tools for examining public presentation…

Insufficient effort responding (IER) affects many forms of assessment in both educational and psychological contexts. Much research has examined different types of IER, IER's impact on the psychometric properties of test scores, and preprocessing procedures used to detect IER. However, there is a gap in the literature in terms of practical advice…

Few studies have explored the subjective mental health of adolescents with intellectual disabilities, while proxy ratings indicate an overrepresentation of mental health problems. The present study reports on the design and an initial empirical evaluation of the Well-being in Special Education Questionnaire (WellSEQ). Questions, response scales,…

There has long been the suspicion amongst staff in Art & Design that the ratings given to their subject disciplines in the UK's National Student Survey are adversely affected by a combination of circumstances--a "perfect storm". The "perfect storm" proposition is tested by comparing ratings for Art & Design with those…

Historically, responses to the Course Experience Questionnaire (CEQ) were required to be collected by self-administered paper or online questionnaire to be eligible for official analysis. CEQ responses collected by telephone were excluded from the final analysis file to minimise the potential for bias due to mode effects: systematic variation in…

Purpose--The purpose of this research is to examine participants' response rate on dual style training course evaluation forms. These combine structured and open-ended formats. Pencil and paper forms have a long history of use by trainers in business and commerce and more recently in education. Research methods texts tend to have neglected the…

This study provides support for the hypothesized effect of leniency on the discriminant validity of grouped questionnaire items. It was found that controlling for leniency resulted in a slight decrement in convergent validity but that discriminant validity was substantially improved. Implications for questionnaire validity and further research are…

Effects of item presentation mode on degree of leniency bias in responses to field research questionnaires were studied. Two modes were examined: first with items measuring the same dimensions grouped together and second with such items distributed randomly. The random mode showed substantially less leniency response bias. (Author/BW)

The empirical evidence does not support the prevailing conventional wisdom that it is advisable to mix positively and negatively worded items in psychological measures to counteract acquiescence response bias. An experiment, evaluating subjects' ability to respond accurately to both positive and reversed items on a questionnaire, analyzed post-hoc…

A study of the construction and factor validity of the Response to Child Incest Questionnaire, a self-report instrument for assessing commonly reported symptoms of adult survivors of incest, is reported. The instrument's usefulness as a pre- and post-treatment measure and further research needs are discussed. (MSE)

Questionnaires are vulnerable to joking and suffer from lack of agreement regarding the unitary traits through which scales are validated. Eight basic requirements for construction of factor-true scales are established and it is shown that one or more of the requirements is missing for 80 percent of recently published questionnaires. (Author)

Content-parallel questionnaire items in which response schemes varied in one of two ways--scale alternatives were all defined or only endpoints were defined, and alternatives were numbered or lettered--were investigated on a large sample of college freshmen. (Author/JKS)

Four selected scales from the Learning Environment Inventory (LEI) were rewritten to measure the students' individual perceptions of their classroom environment, rather than their estimates of the opinions of the class as a whole. Both scales were then administered to 10 7th grade math classes and 4 10th grade social studies classes. The rewritten…

The ability of respondents to properly execute Thurstone scaling procedures as opposed to Likert scaling procedures was investigated in a sample of high school students. Results indicate difficulty among respondents using Thurstone-type instructions to resist giving Likert-type responses. (JKS)