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In
survey research, the questions are frequently termed
'questionnaire items'. It is important that these
items are both reliable and valid.
Reliability is whether the questionnaire item is 'stable' in
that is consistently conveys the same meaning. Does
the person reading the question interpret it in the same way
each time they read it.
There
are a range of tests for reliability. A simple
approach is to ask a group of people to write down what they
think the item means. More developed methods include
test-retest reliability. "Cronbach's alpha" coefficient is
a method of commonly used for measuring reliability
(internal consistency) and is available in packages such as
SPSS. |
