A questionnaire based study has been sent to me for review. The study having cross sectional design has been performed without testing the used questionnaire for validity and reliability. The author has mentioned this in its manuscript. As a reviewer, what should I do?
Asaad Javaid Mirza, I suggest asking a person who has sent you the manuscript to perform basic checking like alpha Cronbach, EFA, convergent and discriminant validity or to remove that particular questionnaire from the study.
Andreas Eisenreich - I mentioned in my question that the author has mentioned in the text of the manuscript that the questionnaire used was not tested for validity and reliabilty. In such case, mentioning it in reviewer's comment becomes useless.
Alexander is right. In preliminary review by editorial staff, these things should be sorted out and then sent for peer reviewing.
If you are reviewing for a top journal, you can recommend rejecting. If it is a moderate journal, requesting the authors to add a paragraph about it in the discussion might be an option. I do not think that, only "mentioning" the situation in the article is sufficient. The disadvantages of using an unvalidated questionnaire should be discussed openly and thoroughly. Thank you for sharing this question.
Thank you Aydin for your input. I think your suggestion is good and practicable.
ask him to apply reliability test on 30 samples and show the cronbachs alpha value.
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