Quality of Different Scales in an Online Survey in Mexico and Colombia

Abstract

"The formulation of theories and hypotheses is done at the level of concepts. These concepts are often tested by operationalizing them using survey questions. However, measurement errors make it impossible for survey questions to measure the concepts of interest perfectly. In order to correct for measurement errors, information is needed about their size, or the size of their complement, the quality. For the USA and Europe, a lot is already known about the quality of questions, but this has not yet been studied in some other parts of the world. In this paper, we use a multitrait-multimethod approach to estimate the quality of 27 questions in Mexico and Colombia. These initial results on quality for Central and Latin American countries show quality estimates that are relatively similar in terms of their relationships with the scale characteristics to what has been observed in the USA and Europe." (author's abstract)