Since this week was the last week that my mentors and I had allotted officially for the design and development phase of our evaluation instrument, I focused my work on finishing the current iteration of the evaluation questionnaire/survey, which I had begun developing over the last few week.
In particular, the key area that I was finalizing for the evaluation questionnaire/survey was the Likert scale format that would be used for the questionnaire/survey. Based on the literature reviews that I performed during Weeks 4 and 5 and as a result of my discussions with my mentors, we decided that we would recommend using a 6-point scale whenever Likert scale was suggested as the question type in our questionnaire/survey. For example, when asking the degree that the respondent would agree to a specific evaluation question, the suggested scale would have the following scale values: Strongly Disagree (1), Disagree (2), Partially Disagree (3), Partially Agree (4), Agree (5), Strongly Agree (6). The same format could be adapted for other adjectives such as Extremely Unlikely (1), Unlikely (2), Partially Unlikely (3), Partially Likely (4), Likely (5), Extremely Likely (6). When considering the trade-offs between using an odd or an even point format (an odd scale would have an exact middle point that would often take a neutral position versus an even scale would have the same number of positive and negative response options) and the number of points on the scale (typical range is from 2-point to 10-point), the 6-point scale format would allow the balance between giving the respondents the opportunity to consider and express different levels of attitude, and at the same time, allowing the scale to be not too complex and time-consuming. With this adjustment completed, I will be discussing with my mentors during next week regarding how to test out the current revision of the evaluation questionnaire/survey.
In addition to finalizing the evaluation tool, I also worked on creating and finishing two matrices for the following comparisons:
- The pros and cons of the different survey variations that were collected during the previous week’s literature review.
- Survey/questionnaire tools based on the areas to consider when choosing a survey/questionnaire tool. The areas to consider were also collected during the previous week’s literature review.
- The survey/questionnaire tools that I compared were: Survey Monkey, Google Form, Zendesk, Desk, Qualtrics, and LimeSurvey
The comparison results would help us understand these topics further as we prepare the paper that would accompany the evaluation tool.
Finally, I continued to work on the paper for the project. During the previous weeks, I had put together the initial draft for the Introduction and the Background/Rationale sections. I had added the Methodology/Process and the Results section, and I am looking forward to continuing to work on the rest of the paper during Week 7.