Assessment of construct validity questionnaires in psychological, educational and Health research: Applications, Methods, and Interpretation of Exploratory factor analysis

Abstract

An important part of studies on psychology of behavior and learning, as well as social and health sciences requires the use of researcher-made questionnaires. To achieve valid results and provide the possibility of publishing the results of a research, researchers seek suitable methods to assess the validity of research tools. This is mainly due to the fact that failure to provide such an important feature in a research tool might lead to the waste of effort and resources allocated to the study. One of the conventional types of validity of measurement tools is construct validity, which is often assessed as one of the most valid statistical techniques using factor analysis method. Generally, factor analysis applies statistical processes to simplify the related measurements and discover a pattern from a group of variables. This method is mainly used to find the simplest way to interpret the observed data. In several fields, including behavioral sciences and psychology, social sciences, medical sciences and nursing, economics, and geography, factor analysis is used as one of the important achievements of technology advancement in computers. In the present research, stages and methods of exploratory factor analysis are discussed and described step-by-step by using SPSS.