Designing and Constructing Instruments for Social Research and Evaluation

David Colton, Ph.D., is adjunct professor at the University of Virginia's Curry School of Graduate Studies in the program in Research, Statistics, and Evaluation, and in the Department of Health Care Administration, Mary Baldwin College, Staunton, Virginia.
 
Robert W. Covert, Ph.D., is associate professor at the University of Virginia's Curry School of Graduate Studies in the program in Research, Statistics, and Evaluation.

Designing and Constructing Instruments for Social Research and Evaluation is a comprehensive step-by-step guide to creating effective surveys, polls, questionnaires, customer satisfaction forms, ratings, checklists, and other instruments.
 
Written in easy-to-understand language, this important text provides a systematic and commonsense approach to developing instruments for data collection and analysis. This book can be used by both those who are developing instruments for the first time and those who want to hone their skills, including students, agency personnel, program managers, and researchers.
 
This book provides a thorough presentation of instrument construction, from conception to development and pre-testing of items, formatting the instrument, administration, and, finally, data management and presentation of the findings. Throughout the book, the authors emphasize how to create an instrument that will produce trustworthy and accurate data. To that end they have included guidelines for reviewing and revising the questionnaire to enhance validity and reliability. They also show how to work effectively with stakeholders such as instrument designers, decision-makers, agency personnel, clients, and raters or respondents.

This comprehensive guide provides a step-by-step approach to creating effective surveys, polls, questionnaires, customer satisfaction forms, ratings, checklists, and other instruments for social sciences research. This book is organized according to the process of instrument construction and takes the reader through each of the steps.

Part 1: Concepts
 
1. Introduction
 
2. Instruments and Social Inquiry
 
3. Measurement
 
4. Instrument Construction, Validity and Reliability
 
Part 2: Application
 
5. Purposeful Creativity - First Steps in the Development of an Instrument
 
6. Pretesting
 
7. The Structure and Format of Selection Items
 
8. Guidelines for Writing Selection Items
 
9. Selection Items: Alternative Formats
 
10. Supply Items: Open-Ended Questions
 
11. Guidelines for Constructing Multi-item Scales
 
Part 3: Organization and Administration
 
12. Organizing the Instrument
 
13. Administering the Instrument
 
14. Computers and Instrument Construction
 
15. Managing the Data and Reporting the Results

Lieferung vom Verlag mit leichten Qualitätsmängeln möglich