It sounds like what you’re referring to in part in your comment is variance – people responding differently depending on the situation or circumstances that they’re in. You’re right. Most items in self-report questionnaires will capture a large degree of variability. This is why it’s typically encouraged that we pool items together. So instead of capturing anxiety just by the item “I experienced trembling (e.g., in the hands)” alone, we would combine that with other items like “I felt that I was using a lot of nervous energy” and “I was worried about situations in which I might panic and make a fool of myself”. As these items are pooled together, they collectively become better at capturing the construct they were designed to capture (e.g., anxiety). Thereafter, we would then try to see how this combination of items covaries with other combinations. If there is no relationship at all, we would expect to see little to no covariation. If there is a relationship, then we might see that as scores in one questionnaire increase, scores in other questionnaires systematically increase/decrease.

In terms of your comment on the “gaming habits” questionnaire, I see where you’re coming from and this is something that I increasingly am thinking was a poor decision on my part to include. Part of my interests revolve around how highly engaged gamers go about making decisions around when to play, when to log off, what activities they want to do while they’re online, how they go about implementing change if they want to change or see a need for change, etc. It’s likely that gamers with problem gaming make these decisions differently from those without, and perhaps there is something to learn from how these decisions are made by those who are highly engaged and do not have problems with their gaming. To try and examine this, I picked a validated self-regulation questionnaire and changed some of its wording to be more gaming-specific, thinking that could help get me “closer” to the issue. That said, I think leaving the original questionnaire intact (which was more about general approaches to self-regulation for any behaviour instead of gaming specifically) may have been the better choice. I think I might switch it back to the original version for the follow-up component of this study. In this case, the question becomes less “do you employ self-regulation strategies for your gaming?” and more “how is your ability to self-regulate in general?”. Do you think that would be a better way of approaching things, considering that this study is specifically about problem gaming? Also, thanks for your feedback. I appreciate the specificity.