2022 Introduction to Statistics in Research Mitchell 2nd ed

I N T R O T O R E S E A R C H : D A T A V I S U A L I Z A T I O N & C O M M O N S T A T T E S T S

Compute a total score or a mean score

At the beginning of this process, we talked about how we might combine several questions into one construct. If all five questions relate to the same construct, we can calculate a scale score (sum) or a scale score (average). According to Adams & McGuire (2022), a scale score “is computed from items assessing a particular construct, most commonly a sum or average of the numbers representing responses to individual items in the document” (p. 73). When communicating to readers, you want to consider descript ive term instead of names like question one. So for this global warming questionnaire, the construct might be global warming concern . But if this was a pilot questionnaire, I’d be considering adding questions to determine if individuals would pay higher taxes to support the government incentives talked about in question two and a host of other questions that gauges the depth of their concern. Once I added about twenty questions, I would want to determine how well the items “hang together” to create a con struct. Obviously the global warming questionnaire is too small to conduct a factor analysis; however, factor analysis is used heavily in a questionnaire when the researcher want to condense many variables into just a few.

This new variable will represent the total or average of all the individual items on a measurement scale. It is important to note – we will use Q1, Q2, Q4R, and Q5. We dropped Recoded - QR3GW

1) On the menu boar, click transform > Compute variable

2) A pop-up screen will appear. Please give a name to the measurement scale and create a numeric expression. Notice the recoded variable, not the original, and Q3R was not used at all. Select each variable with a double-click followed by a + and then click OK.

Table 31: Compute a total score in SPSS version 27.

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