Hello Saroj,

By "multi-categorical option," do you mean that respondents may choose more than one of the options as their answer to the question/item/stimulus?

If so, the simplest approach would be to treat such an item as k individual yes/no items, where k is the number of options listed in the item/question. Then record each person's response as a "yes" if they chose that option, and "no" otherwise.

Good luck with your work.

David Morse

Sir, Thank You for your response.

but in my instrument, respondent will choose only one option.

for example- Item 1- I mostly prefer to study from - Textbook / E-material/ Self-note.

one may choose only one option like textbook .

Sir, again in the instrument, I have given some item in binary i.e. yes or no ; and some item in continuous such as how much hours students are studying. @@@

Hello again Saroj,

So, the real question now becomes, what is it you wish to find out from analysis of each item?

If you are worried about score reliability, I think your best bet is to administer the measure them twice (with some suitable time interval separating the administrations) and (for your "multiple option items") record what proportion of persons choose the same option on both occasions. This is a proportion agreement approach to score stability estimation on the item. Further, you can correct this agreement for chance via Cohen's kappa (which uses marginal frequencies of the k x k table to generate agreement expected by chance alone).

For continuous scale items, you could correlate the two scores, or just declare the two scores as sufficiently identical if they differ by no more than some declared amount (e.g., if hours of study per day matched within 10 minutes).

For reporting purposes (e.g., "What did I find out?") it may be sufficient to list counts and percents (of total responding) for each option on the multiple option items. For continuous scale responses, reporting something like Tukey's 5-number summary might be helpful (lowest score, lower hinge, median, upper hinge, highest score).

All of this is a good example of why it's important to carefully consider what type of information you'd like to obtain from your study before going forth to collect data.

Good luck with your work.

Thank You so much

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By categorical, do you mean the responses are not a scale?