The Development of a Qualitative Extension for the Personally Expressive Activities Questionnaire (PEAQ-QE): A Construct Validation Study

Abstract

This study describes the development of a qualitative extension for the Personally Expressive Activities Questionnaire (PEAQ), a widely used quantitative questionnaire assessing feeling of personal expressiveness, a core positive identity construct. The PEAQ qualitative extension was developed as part of an ongoing effort to develop and refine an easy-to-use, standardized, reliable method designed for use in adding a free response qualitative component to a full range of fixed response quantitative measures. This article reports basic psychometric properties for the qualitative extension and preliminary evidence of construct validity. The availability of a ready-at-hand standardized method for including free response qualitative extensions of widely used measures with known reliability and validity in developmental research provides a means for detecting and rendering theoretically meaningful: (a) unique sample-specific free response linguistic content properties, (b) linguistic content properties undetected by fixed response measures, and (c) newly emergent linguistic content properties of core developmental research concepts and constructs in ways not possible using fixed response methods alone.

Empowering Marginalized Youth: A Self‐Transformative Intervention for Promoting Positive Youth Development

“…Brief narratives about participants’ life goals were elicited using the Personally Expressive Activities Questionnaire–Qualitative Extension (PEAQ–QE; Rinaldi et al., ). Participants identified three life goals, selected their most important goal, and provided an open‐ended description of its meaning and significance.…”

“…Life goal narratives were coded using the theoretical coding categories developed by relational data analysis (RDA) and reported in Rinaldi et al. (). RDA draws on methods associated with grounded theory, a general methodology for generating theory from data that includes strategies such as open coding and constant comparison (Strauss & Corbin, ).…”

“…RDA draws on methods associated with grounded theory, a general methodology for generating theory from data that includes strategies such as open coding and constant comparison (Strauss & Corbin, ). RDA extends these methods to include the use of both theory‐neutral and theory‐laden panels of coders across multiple phases of analysis (see Kurtines, Montgomery, Arango, et al., ; Rinaldi et al., ). Reliability analysis revealed very high intercoder agreement (96%) among five coders on whether life goals were personally expressive or nonpersonally expressive (Fleiss's κ = .84).…”

Promoting Positive Youth Development: A Psychosocial Intervention Evaluation

“…Positive outcome: Personally expressive life goals. The Personally Expressive Activities Questionnaire -Qualitative Extension (PEAQ-QE) (Rinaldi et al, 2012) adds an open-ended response component to the PEAQ to provide a method for eliciting the narrative/linguistic expressions of meaning and significance of participants' most important life goals. Specifically, participants were asked to identify up to three life goals and then to identify their most important life goal.…”

Cognitive Competence and Life Course Change in Multi-Problem Adolescents

“…The Development of a Free-Response Performance-Based Indicator of Critical Evaluation As Rinaldi et al (2011) have noted, the use of qualitative free-response measures in developmental research broadens the scope of the investigation beyond the examination of properties identified as theoretically meaningful prior to conducting the research, i.e., as is usually done under cross-sectional and longitudinal quantitative research designs using fixed-response measures . Although there are many advantages to the use of such methods of data collection, an important limitation of their use is that fixed-response measures rule out in advance the possibility of detecting response properties that are uniquely meaningful (ordinary language meaning, theoretical meaning, or both) within a specific population not previously studied, qualitatively transformed, or involving temporal change (e.g., developmental, historical, longitudinal, or intervention change) resulting in newly emergent properties in a previously studied population .…”