Abstract

Language researchers who wish to conduct research may want to create their own survey to collect the information that they want to write up and publish. This paper explains how to conduct research by reporting the author’s development, piloting, administration and analysis of a substantive scale survey for research purposes. A substantive scale uses questions and a scale system (e.g. a Likert scale) to gather data for analysis. The sections of this paper are explained using the author’s own research project as an example. The survey was designed to determine whether respondents could be classified as intrinsically or extrinsically motivated. Exploratory factor analysis confirmed the students tended to adhere to one or the other motivational type.

Introduction

To begin a research project survey, there are critical questions that must be answered: How to formulate a hypothesis? How to choose the questions and how many? In what order should they be listed? What type of scale should be used? For example, the most common type of scale is the Likert scale. These generally use a 1 to 5, 6, or 7 numeric systems, which corresponds to a series of answers such as always, sometimes, never, etc. There are more than a dozen different scale types (Alreck & Settle, 2003); however, sometimes a simple Yes/No question will suffice (Stone, 2003). (more…)