Statistical Methods for Item Reduction in a Representative Lifestyle Questionnaire: Pilot Questionnaire Study

Abstract

Background Reducing the number of items in a questionnaire while maintaining relevant information is important as it is associated with advantages such as higher respondent engagement and reduced response error. However, in health care, after the original design, an a posteriori check of the included items in a questionnaire is often overlooked or considered to be of minor importance. When conducted, this is often based on a single selected method. We argue that before finalizing any lifestyle questionnaire, a posteriori validation should always be conducted using multiple approaches to ensure the robustness of the results. Objective The objectives of this study are to compare the results of two statistical methods for item reduction (variance inflation factor [VIF] and factor analysis [FA]) in a lifestyle questionnaire constructed by combining items from different sources and analyze the different results obtained from the 2 methods and the conclusions that can be made about the original items. Methods Data were collected from 79 participants (heterogeneous in age and sex) with a high risk of metabolic syndrome working in a financial company based in Tokyo. The lifestyle questionnaire was constructed by combining items (asked with daily, weekly, and monthly frequency) from multiple validated questionnaires and other selected questions. Item reduction was conducted using VIF and exploratory FA. Adequacy tests were used to check the data distribution and sampling adequacy. Results Among the daily and weekly questions, both VIF and FA identified redundancies in sleep-related items. Among the monthly questions, both approaches identified redundancies in stress-related items. However, the number of items suggested for reduction often differed: VIF suggested larger reductions than FA for daily questions but fewer reductions for weekly questions. Adequacy tests always confirmed that the structural detection was adequate for the considered items. Conclusions As expected, our analyses showed that VIF and FA produced both similar and different findings, suggesting that questionnaire designers should consider using multiple methods for item reduction. Our findings using both methods indicate that many questions, especially those related to sleep, are redundant, indicating that the considered lifestyle questionnaire can be shortened.

The Acceptability of Traditional Culture under the Background of Deep Learning

“…If y xx is less than 0.70, then the questionnaire is not suitable for individual evaluation, nor is it suitable for comparison between groups. For group comparison, y xx should be greater than or equal to 0.70, while it should be greater than or equal to 0.85 to identify individuals [ 14 ].…”

Digital Technologies Adoption and Economic Benefits in Agriculture: A Mixed-Methods Approach

“…Before conducting NBREG and 2SLS regression, we performed multicollinearity tests. The results indicated no significant multicollinearity (see Table 5), as there were no tolerance values below 0.1 or Variance Inflation Factor (VIF) values exceeding 5 [84,85]. We employ the NBREG model to reveal the factors influencing DT adoption intensity (see Table 6).…”

Development and validation of the patient reported outcomes questionnaire of children with asthma in China: A Caregiver's proxy-reported measure

“…Second, reverse scoring items were converted using the following rules (4 = 0, 3 = 1, 1 = 3, and 0 = 4). Then, the following 5 methods were used for the item selection (20). (1) The critical ratio analysis method: by computing and sorting the total score of the questionnaire, the critical scores of the upper and lower groups were found to be 27%.…”