Pretesting

what is the importance of pretesting questions and instruments? What are risks in not doing this? Provide an example that illustrates your response.

Pretesting questions and instruments is very essential. It is a step that should not be avoided by any means. Pretesting can give a supportive idea that the measures being taken may or may not be useful. The purpose of a study may vary highly. Pretesting allows a researcher to ensure that the test will perhaps support the study and/or provide useful information towards drawing a conclusion.

According to Cooper and Schindler,

“There are abundant reasons for pretesting individual questions, questionnaires, and interview schedules. These reasons include discovering, exploring and increasing (Cooper & Schindler, 2008).

Researchers can discover effective measures of obtaining interest, errors or problems, and target questions; or training needs. Researchers can also use pretesting to explore methods of improvement. Pretesting can be used as a training measure also. Pretesting can give researchers an opportunity to practice presentation, and identifying issues.

Not pretesting can cause a researcher a lot of time and inaccurate results. A researcher that fails to pretest may encounter issues such as a useless survey that does not support the study; issues with flow and continuity, improper wording or confusion and so on. All these are issues that could have been discovered with pretesting. An example of the negative affects of not pretesting would be conducting a study and the questions are worded in a way that is not clearly defined or hard to understand. For example, suppose a questionnaire is designed for individuals that have not completed high school, yet it is worded on a master’s level. Although some individuals may understand the language, it is not expected that everyone will be able to understand the language. Such will result in inaccurate results or a waste of time. The survey will need to be...