Quality of different scales in an online survey in Mexico and Colombia

Revilla, Melanie; Ochoa, Carlos

Quality of different scales in an online survey in Mexico and Colombia

License

Citation

Revilla, M, Ochoa, C. Quality of different scales in an online survey in Mexico and Colombia. 2013. handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10230/28347

This citation was generated automatically.

Abstract

The formulation of theories and hypotheses is done at the level of concepts. In order to test them, these concepts are often operationalized using survey questions. However, survey questions never measure the concepts of interest perfectly, because of measurement errors. In order to correct for measurement errors, one needs information about their size, or the size of their complement, the quality. For the USA and Europe, a lot is already known about the quality of questions depending on the scale characteristics. However, in other parts of the world, this was not studied yet. Therefore, in this paper, we use a multitrait-multimethod approach to estimate the quality of 27 questions in Mexico and Colombia. These first results about quality for central and Latin American countries show quality estimates relatively similar in their relationships with the scale characteristics to what was observed in US and European countries.