RESPONDENTS’ INTERPRETATIONS ABOUT RESPONSE CATEGORIES OF QUESTIONNAIRES

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Questionnaires, which are frequently used measurement instruments in social sciences, are easily distrubuted to a large number of people and allow anonimity. When developing a questionnaire, researchers should be sure that the response categories are mutually exclusive and encompass the total range of answers and should check whether the response categories have the same meaning to all respondents or not. The purpose of this article is to introduce the respondents’ interpretations about response categories of rating scales. For this purpose, two questionnaires are developed, which have the same items but different response categories. In first questionnaire, response categories was words about frequency, time, money and distance as “sometimes”, “a long time”, “much money”, “near” etc. In the other questionnaire, the reponse categories was quantified as “once a day or more”, “about 20km-50km”, “about 100TL-300TL” etc. Intercategorization was examined with kappa statisticAs a result it is introduced that response categories of first questionnaire did not have the same meaning for all respondents. To make the response categories clear, it can be proposed for researchers to quantify the response categories.

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response categories , questionnaire , rating scale

Abant İzzet Baysal Üniversitesi Eğitim Fakültesi Dergisi

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Abant İzzet Baysal Üniversitesi Eğitim Fakültesi Dergisi