Survey Instrument for The Project
Describe a survey, instrument, or tool you plan to use in your project. Describe the tool in terms of name, the number of items, how it is answered (Likert scale, yes/no, open answer), and the total score. Describe the level of measurement for this instrument. Support with references.
Topic of my project: In African American males recovering from radical prostatectomy surgery, does nursing early implementation of Kegel exercises improve the incidence of urinary incontinence as compared to current practice over a 4 week period?
Sample Answer
Describe the tool in terms of name, the number of items, how it is answered and the total score.
For the project “In African American males recovering from radical prostatectomy surgery, does nursing early implementation of Kegel exercises improves the incidence of urinary incontinence as compared to current practice over four weeks?” a suitable survey instrument would be a questionnaire. A questionnaire is a form of a survey instrument used to collect/gather information about the participants’ preferences, factual information, and attitudes concerning the topic being studied. Questionnaires include a set of questions that are structured in a particular order to extract the required information from the study participants. The project involves determining whether early Kegel exercises among African American males who have had prostatectomy surgery improve urinary incontinence. To determine such, it would then be essential to assess the frequency of the symptoms associated with urinary incontinence and personal attitudes/opinions towards Kegel exercises. Thus, a questionnaire would be suitable for determining the frequency of the symptoms and the personal opinions and attitudes towards implementing Kegel exercises (Schnall et al., 2018).
In this project, closed-ended questionnaires will be the most suitable. The closed-ended questions comprise of a set of questions that are accompanied by pre-defined answers from which the respondents are then required to choose from, for example, the questions can be dichotomous where the participants are required to answer with “yes or no,” or they include multiple choices questions including those that use Likert scale. The advantage of using closed-ended questionnaires is that they can be used to collect quantitative data for statistical analysis, appropriate for this study (Yaddanapudi & Yaddanapudi, 2019).
The questionnaire will include an average of 20 items that the participants will answer. A good questionnaire should not take too long to answer, neither should it be too short. This ensures that the respondent is adequately engaged throughout the process and that the responses provided are accurate. In this project, the questionnaire will be administered more than once to assess the patients’ progress, and it thus needs to be short enough to ensure that the patients are comfortable with accurately responding to the questions. A 20-item questionnaire will thus be suitable for this project. The questions will include dichotomous questions in which the respondents will be provided with “yes or no” options for answers and multiple-choice questions which will utilize a Likert scale such as “excellent, very good, good, and fair.” For the total score, each responsible for the questions included will be assigned a value. For example, in dichotomous questions with yes or no response options, the yes response can be assigned a value of 2 while the no response is assigned the 1 (Yes=2 and No= 1). In the multiple-choice questions, each response will be assigned a value; for example, the values can range from 1 to 5 for the Likert scale where excellent will be assigned 1 and poor will be assigned a score of 5. For the questions that will be left unanswered, a 0 score can be assigned to simplify the calculation of the questionnaire score (Yaddanapudi & Yaddanapudi, 2019).
Describe the Level of Measurement for this Instrument
The level of measurement of the closed-ended questionnaire is the ordinal level. The ordinal level ranks the variables in order but does not establish the difference between the variables. An example of an ordinal scale is the Likert scale utilized in this project since the difference between very good and good cannot be statistically differentiated. The ordinal level mainly classifies qualitative data (Mishra et al., 2018).
