An Exploratory Study on Post-Survey Scale Evaluation (303382)

Keywords: Questionnaire Evaluation

The Quality of Life Among Military Families: A Survey of Spouses and Partners of Canadian Armed Forces Members (QoL Survey) is a continuous survey that examines the challenges faced by military families, and the results of the survey assist the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) in strengthening support programs and services for CAF spouses and partners. Six items in the 2013 iteration of the QoL Survey measured the impact of military life on spousal employment. This report presents the results of a post-survey evaluation of these six items, conducted using the responses of 1,366 spouses and partners of CAF Regular Force members. Classic psychometric analyses (including item-total correlation analysis, principal component analysis, and reliability analysis) support using a 5-item, 1-dimension scale with high reliability in place of the current six items. However, further analyses on these six items challenge the results of classic psychometric analyses. The distributions of responses and nonresponses to each item suggest a 3-item scale instead of a 5-item scale. This finding was confirmed by a categorical principal components analysis and by qualitative analyses on the six items. In addition, qualitative analyses suggest that items of the 3-item scale need to be improved, a finding further supported by a latent class analysis after dichotomizing each of the three items in the scale. Recommendations for post-survey scale evaluation are made based on the results obtained in this exploratory study.