Practical Guidelines to Develop and Evaluate a Questionnaire

Abstract

Life expectancy is gradually increasing due to continuously improving medical and nonmedical interventions. The increasing life expectancy is desirable but brings in issues such as impairment of quality of life, disease perception, cognitive health, and mental health. Thus, questionnaire building and data collection through the questionnaires have become an active area of research. However, questionnaire development can be challenging and suboptimal in the absence of careful planning and user-friendly literature guide. Keeping in mind the intricacies of constructing a questionnaire, researchers need to carefully plan, document, and follow systematic steps to build a reliable and valid questionnaire. Additionally, questionnaire development is technical, jargon-filled, and is not a part of most of the graduate and postgraduate training. Therefore, this article is an attempt to initiate an understanding of the complexities of the questionnaire fundamentals, technical challenges, and sequential flow of steps to build a reliable and valid questionnaire.

Keywords: Instrument; psychometrics; questionnaire development; reliability; scale construction; validity.

Figure 1

Flowchart demonstrating the various steps involved in the development of a questionnaire

Figure 2

A hypothetical example showing the researcher's dilemma of selecting 6, 10, or 15 factors through scree plot