Sources of items

Your sources of items will normally be discourse and text. One or more of the following can be used:

• • Brainstorming sessions: You and others may sit and write items.
• • Conversations: Ideas may be got from this source.
• • Open-ended qualitative interviews: These are systematic methods of ensuring that you cover the ground, other than brainstorming or conversation. If you have never done this type of work, you could start with two useful articles on qualitative methodology: by Elliott, Fischer, and Rennie (1999) and Braun and Clarke (2006). For a fuller treatment consult a handbook such as that by Denzin and Lincoln (2017), King and Horrocks (2018) or Silverman (2017), or a general research methods handbook with sections on interviewing, such as that by Reis and Judd (2014). Websites with material on non-directive interviewing include Medecins sans frontieres (http://fieldresearch. msf.org/msf/bitstream/10144/84230/l/Qualitative%20research%20 methodology.pdf) or for more advanced sources, the University of Surrey Social Research Update (http://sru.soc.surrey.ac.uk/). You will need to construct an interview schedule - remember that allowing respondents to speak freely is not a free-for-all as far as the investigator is concerned. You will need to ensure that you use listening and prompting skills correctly, and avoid evaluative, over-directive or interpretive comments - an interview is not a conversation. You should record the methods used to sample or select interviewees, and you need to observe basic research ethics, including confidentiality and making clear to interviewees that they can withdraw at any time. You may need to seek approval from the research ethics committee of your institution.
• • Group discussion (focus group) sessions; many of the techniques are similar to those used in interviewing; consulting a guide on the use of focus groups, for example relevant sections in Denzin and Lincoln (2017) or Silverman (2017), or books such as those by Krueger and Casey (2014) or Stewart and Shamdasani (2015).
• • Published or unpublished texts may be used as a source of brief quotes or ideas that you can use as a basis for your items. With published texts make sure you do not violate copyright restrictions, notably by quoting too heavily from any published work. Quotation of more than about 50 words may need the consent of the copyright holder. With any quotation, acknowledge the source. With unpublished texts you need to make sure that you are not violating confidentiality.

Checking items

Having generated or collected a large pool of potential items, items need to be checked to ensure that they meet the following criteria (try to get at least one other opinion as well as your own):

• • Face validity (see also Chapter 6): Does the item appear to be about what you want to assess? For example 'I love ice lollies’ has no true face validity on a scale assessing favourability to ice cream. You may have decided not to aim for face validity, but you will need to offer a sound reason for this. Face validity should be checked by one or more people from the same population that you are going to ask to complete your measure. They should be shown each item and asked to say whether it is actually about what you are measuring. Any that are not satisfactory should be discarded.
• • Content validity (see Chapter 5): Is the item about what you want to assess? Content validity should be checked by one or more judges who have some expertise in the topic you are assessing.
• • Lack of ambiguity: ‘I often feel mad’ might be unambiguous to North Americans but may be ambiguous or misleading to speakers of British English. You can probably think of other examples of ways in which the meanings of words vary in different regions and different groups. Be alert to this possibility, and check items with one or more people from the group(s) you are targeting.
• • Not double barrelled: It is surprising how often one can finish up with double-barrelled statements, sometimes as a result of trying to achieve clarity. The respondent does not know which ‘bit’ to respond to: for example ‘People in authority often do irresponsible or dangerous things’. Eliminate such double-barrelled items - they can often be transformed into two.

• • Reverse meaning: If you are assessing attitudes to or beliefs about a particular issue, it is important to create some items that are ‘against’ the attitude or belief under investigation, to combat the possibility that you may be assessing yea-saying (which is the tendency to agree with any statement, especially if it comes from an authoritative or officiallooking source, and which can affect answers quite considerably).
• • Social desirability: This is something you may not be able to do much about when creating items, but once an item is written, think about whether it might be socially desirable to answer in one way or another; if this possibility exists, you would need to assess social desirability effects. For example, some people may not want to admit to feeling depressed, or angry, or to holding certain beliefs. Alternatively, they may exaggerate the extent to which they feel happy, or hold certain beliefs. A social-desirability measure may be used (e.g. the still widely used Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale [Crowne & Marlowe, 1960] or the Lie Scale of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory [MMPI: Hathaway & McKinley, 1951, 1967; or MMPI-2: Graham, 2011]). If you are concerned, you may be able to set your mind at rest by showing that your measure is not associated with social desirability. If there is an association, you may be able to clean up your measure by weedingout those items that are strongly associated with social desirability. Or you can use statistical techniques (such as partial correlation, or multiple regression analysis) to partial out the effects of social desirability, in any analyses looking at the relations between your measure and other factors.
• • Offensiveness: If you are investigating sensitive issues, you need to be particularly careful not to cause offence. Always be alert for this, as you should not be upsetting people - for both ethical and pragmatic reasons.

It is very important to get at least one other viewpoint in addition to your own. When you have been closely concerned with creating items, you need a fresh mind to spot most of the previously listed concerns.

Throw out or re-write until you have items that have face or content validity (assuming that you have no good reason to avoid these forms of validity), which are unambiguous (and not double barrelled) and are unlikely to cause offense. Where appropriate, make sure that some of your items are “anti-“, and think about whether social desirability effects are possible, taking action as suggested earlier if necessary.