Dear RG friends,
I am developing a project which will investigate the potential impact of COVID-19 on the evidence-based information use of healthcare staff.
My key question to clinicians asks how often have they used the particular resources (e.g., consulting with peers, using electronic databases [such as PubMed]) to find evidence-based information.
My initial answer choices were: 1) Never; 2) Less than monthly; 3) Monthly; 4) Weekly; 5) Several times a week; 6) Daily; and 7) Several times a day.
However, in this design 'Weekly' and 'Several times a week' can be misleading as most of our clinical staff works an on/off rota, usually 4 days a week; thus these two options can mean the same thing.
I am wondering whether including a 'bi-weekly' option would be more suitable in this scenario.
Looking forward to reading your expert opinions!
Hi Lukasz
may I ask you a question in return: What made you choose a 7-point Likert-scale in the first place? Why not provide 5 or 10 options?
Setting aside your target group, I am sure you will find many examples of media usage questionnaires that employ different response formats, both with respect to the number of options and their description. I would recommend designing/adapting one that makes sense for your research question and perhaps even choose a format that is used most in your field.
If it is just between 'Weekly' and 'Several times a week', you could simply replace 'Weekly' with 'Once a week'.
Hope that helps.
Best
Marcel
Hi Marcel,
Thank you for asking.
A 5-point scale would not allow enough answer options to faithfully capture the information seeking behaviors in a clinical setting. For example, we know from previous research that junior doctors as well as nursing staff at all levels consult with senior medical staff at least several times a day to clarify some aspects of particular patient's treatment/management plan. At the same time, senior medical staff design these plans according to current practice guidance and are likely to use these resources on average once each day. Therefore, both 'daily' and 'several times a day' options are necessary to picture these behaviors during the pandemic to investigate potential impacts on evidence-based practices and therefore the quality of care delivered. This also applies to the other end of the spectrum in different context, and a 5-point Likert would not allow us to accommodate all the options.
Simultaneously, options such as 'once a year' would be not an appropriate answer during the pandemic, whereas 'several times a year' and 'less than monthly' options could potentially be the same answer during this period. For that reason a 10-pont Likert scale is not really suitable, and seemingly only a 7-point scale can be balanced properly.
We are investigating this across several clinical professions which all use information differently
The usual reason to recommending odd numbers of response categories is to create a "middle category" for those who do not lean either direction on a topic. But that is not relevant here, so you could certainly use 6 response categories, if that is easier to set up.
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