Scale Construction and Development, Remote – May 2021

Event Phone: 1-610-715-0115

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In the unlikely event that Statistical Horizons LLC must cancel a seminar, we will do our best to inform you as soon as possible of the cancellation. You would then have the option of receiving a full refund of the seminar fee or a credit towards another seminar. In no event shall Statistical Horizons LLC be liable for any incidental or consequential damages that you may incur because of the cancellation.

A 3-Day Remote Seminar
Taught by Deborah Bandalos, Ph.D.

Multiple-item scales designed to measure attitudes, opinions, personality, and other attributes are ubiquitous in today’s world, and are widely used in making hiring decisions, assessing student, customer, and employee satisfaction, conducting needs assessments and program evaluations, and in research projects. Those involved in such activities often have little knowledge of how to effectively develop and evaluate the scales they need. This knowledge is crucial because data obtained from these scales are only as good as the scales themselves. Scales that are not well developed often yield data that are not usable for the intended purpose.

This workshop is designed to give you the concepts and tools to develop attitude, personality, opinion, or other noncognitive scales for any of the purposes just described.

Day 1 will cover current theory and best practices in scale construction. In particular, we will review current research on

  • the impact of vaguely worded or negatively worded items on scale reliability and validity
  • the optimal length of a survey
  • how many scale points to include
  • whether scale points should be labeled or unlabeled
  • whether to include a neutral option
  • how item order effects may impact responses.

Day 2 will cover the use of exploratory factor analysis (EFA) in the scale development and revision process. We will focus on basic EFA analysis and the interpretation of model parameters, with an emphasis on best practices in using EFA-based information to inform scale development. We will also discuss common issues in EFA, such as method factors, weak factors, and highly correlated factors. There will be several examples with real data sets, using SPSS and SAS for the analysis.

Day 3 will introduce confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and its use in scale development and the revision process. We will discuss estimation of CFA models and interpretation of CFA model parameters. There will be an extended coverage of reasons for CFA model misfit, including issues with redundant and similarly worded items, cross-loading items, and method effects. We will also discuss the relation between model fit and the homogeneity of item intercorrelations. These methods will be illustrated with the Mplus program. Sample code will be provided for analyses that include

  • CFA models
  • bifactor models
  • calculation of coefficient omega
  • tests of item parallelism.

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