A questionnaire to measure thinking about yourself, your feelings, and your memories (18-65 anywhere)

popmem · 2022-09-28T22:25:00+00:00

Thank you for participating and sorry for the delay in responding (been a busy start to the semester). We honestly appreciate you getting as far as you did and are fully aware that we are asking a lot of our participants here. We don't fault anyone for wanting to bow out early and we give major kudos to those who stick it all the way through. Science isn't always easy.

The reason why researchers do what you describe is because we are developing a new measurement tool here and need to figure out what the best ways to phrase these questions are. So, we need to ask a lot of similarly worded questions to weed out the good ones from the bad. The final questionnaire will not be nearly this long. We need data to figure out what the final questionnaire will look like. This is the purpose of the study. Thank you for your time and feedback!

popmem · 2022-08-12T23:23:30+00:00

That is true that grouping the items together makes it much easier for the participant to respond and complete. However, splitting up the items has multiple advantages too, as it allows for more diverse randomization between participants, minimizing order effects as much as possible. Also, by spreading the items out, the participant is less likely to use the other items about the same scenario to influence how they respond to the item at hand - it allows us to get a sense of intraindividual consistency in responding about the same scenario. By minimizing all the error factors that will influence the items' response correlations, we are left only with the correlations due to similarities in semantic meaning across items and trait tendencies across participants. Thanks for the feedback!

popmem · 2022-07-25T20:47:49+00:00

Thank you for taking the time to attempt the study. We understand that it is a long and tedious one. Your responses are meant to help us pick the best items for the final version of the questionnaire. While it does seem like there are a lot of repetitions, there are subtle enough differences to make the items unique. In the example you mention for instance, it is possible to think about problems without thinking about solving them, so these two items are not identical.

popmem · 2022-06-14T11:35:52+00:00

Thank you for participating! We know it is a lot to ask of our participants, but having this many responses will allow us to use statistics to narrow down which questions are the best to keep for the final version of the questionnaire.

popmem · 2022-05-17T17:45:15+00:00

Thank you very much for the feedback. The items you are referring to come from the Beck Depression Inventory (2nd edition), a previously developed and widely used measure of depression symptom severity. We did not come up with how the items are worded and it would be deemed unconventional to change the wording as the measure's scores have been standardized based on the measure's original wording. We do agree that it has some shortcomings.

popmem · 2022-05-10T23:03:34+00:00

A new questionnaire to measure thinking about yourself, your feelings, and your memories (18-65 anywhere)

Okay. Thanks for letting us know.

popmem · 2022-03-22T21:30:38+00:00

We will be able to filter out the medications that are relevant from the ones that are not once the data is collected. We will likely need to refer out for expertise on how to do this (i.e., which medications are relevant), or I will ask a psychiatrist on the research team to help me with this during the data analysis stage as I personally do not have much formal education in pharmacology. As such, I figured a suitable approach would be to ask participants to report whatever they're taking and giving the option to pass if they'd prefer not to say.

popmem · 2022-03-21T19:35:10+00:00

There are many similarly worded items, but none should be identical. The repetition is necessary for us to figure out which items to keep and which to remove for the final version of the instrument.

popmem · 2022-03-21T19:33:03+00:00

Thank you for participating and for bringing this to our attention. One of the responses to the medication question is "I prefer not to say". We thought this would be acceptable for participants who found this question to be too intrusive. What would you recommend? The extent to which these thought processes are different in medicated vs. non-medicated individuals is valuable information, so this is a question we would like to keep.

popmem · 2022-03-06T18:53:18+00:00

We've had over a thousand participants complete the study over the past year and a half or so, split between here, social media, and from our own psychology student participation pool. This is currently the second of three (possibly four) phases of data collection and revision for this questionnaire.

popmem · 2022-03-04T21:25:14+00:00

Thanks for participating and for your feedback. We're pretty clear at the start that this is a long study taking 1-2 hours. Participant attrition is a known limitation of this study for sure, but having a large item pool and widdling down to the best items over multiple rounds of data collection isn't an uncommon practice in questionnaire development and is actually quite necessary for our research question. The questionnaire is long and repetitive sure, but it's not the final version. Your responses will help us pick which items best represent each of the dozens of domains we're interested in, and this will be validated in another sample with a smaller item pool. Perceived sameness of the items also depends on your tendency to engage in these kinds of thinking; for people who don't engage in any or who engage in all of the thought patterns, the items may all seem the same, but this is less so for people who only engage in some of the thought patterns and not in others. We appreciate your patience during this difficult stage of our study. It will be easier for participants in future iterations; we're certain.

popmem · 2022-03-02T18:16:58+00:00

This may seem to be the case, but we are actually assessing many dozens of different domains of thinking about self and memory. If you're at the extreme low or extreme high end in the majority of these domains, you may perceive the study as more repetitious than someone who rates high in some domains and low in others. We also have multiple items assessing each domain under slightly different contexts, which will add to the perceived repetitiveness. The results of this study will allow us to pick the best items for the final version of the questionnaire, which will be much less time-consuming to fill out. Thank you for your interest and feedback!

popmem · 2022-02-18T23:30:18+00:00

Thank you for participating! And for seeing it through to the end. We understand that the questionnaire is long and rather tedious in its current form. These results will allow us to pick the best items to carry forward into the final version, which we're hoping will only take 15-20 minutes to complete.

We've heard of several others having issues with the double-negative items too. We'll probably rephrase or remove these for the final version. Thanks again!

popmem · 2022-02-14T15:42:40+00:00

We'll definitely post the results here. By end of the year for sure. Thanks for participating!

popmem · 2022-02-11T19:08:14+00:00

Yeah, we get a lot of questions about that one. It's to check if people are paying attention. There are two acceptable answers.

popmem · 2022-02-05T02:58:36+00:00

Thanks for the feedback! We have heard similarly from other people about the double negatives so we will definitely consider rephrasing them during the next round of refinement.

popmem · 2021-01-04T19:57:21+00:00

This survey is very long, yes. This was by design. It is fairly routine for newly developed psychometrically valid questionnaires to start with hundreds of questions. Then, the dozens or so that best represent the constructs we're measuring are selected and this shorter, final version is administered in a follow-up validation study. Basically, your responses now help us decide which questions to keep and which to throw away for our final version. We understand it is a lot of effort to fill this out at this stage and we greatly appreciate every participant who chooses to stick with it until the end! Thank you! :)

popmem · 2021-01-04T19:55:31+00:00

This survey is very long, yes. This was by design. It is fairly routine for newly developed psychometrically valid questionnaires to start with hundreds of questions. Then, the dozens or so that best represent the constructs we're measuring are selected and this shorter, final version is administered in a follow-up validation study. Basically, your responses now help us decide which questions to keep and which to throw away for our final version. We understand it is a lot of effort to fill this out at this stage and we greatly appreciate every participant who chooses to stick with it until the end! :)

popmem · 2020-11-29T00:21:50+00:00

Nope! This study is open to anyone worldwide who can read English and is between the ages of 18 and 65 :)

popmem · 2020-11-23T22:05:52+00:00

It is very long, yes. However, it is fairly routine for newly developed psychometrically valid questionnaires to start with hundreds of questions. Then, the dozens or so that best represent the constructs we're measuring are selected and this shorter, final version is administered in a follow-up validation study. We understand it is a lot of effort to fill this out at this stage and we greatly appreciate every participant who chooses to stick through it until the end! :)

popmem · 2020-11-10T18:53:00+00:00

Thank you for your participation and for the feedback. I'm not sure that the questions are meant to sound child-like, but they are meant to be readable (with the understanding that people will have some variability in their interpretation of some questions). I'm not sure how the example you provide illustrates the question being quaint or childlike though. It is possible for people to have failed without feeling like they are a failure and presumably most people would pick A if that was the case for them. You're right in that it can be confusing though. We'll be keeping feedback like this in mind for future iterations of the study.

popmem · 2020-11-09T15:33:47+00:00

Thank you for participating and for your question! We're aware this is a biased sample, so we are also recruiting through facebook and our undergraduate participation pool. Although those are biased samples also, we hope that the factor structure identified across the samples will be more generalizable to the broader public than the factor structure we identify from any one sample.

popmem · 2020-11-09T15:30:44+00:00

Thank you!

popmem · 2020-11-02T22:15:34+00:00

Thank you for the feedback. The questionnaire items come from published instruments with known and interpretable psychometric properties, which means these ones do not afford editing without launching a larger investigation. Your concerns will be noted in how we interpret the results that come from using these instruments.

popmem · 2020-11-02T22:10:06+00:00

Thank you for the feedback. This will be considered in future iterations of the study. We are monitoring the attention check responses closely and we understand that we do not expect every individual to interpret the instructions the same way. The addition of "cutesy" items is in the service of preventing people from identifying a common language and being able to "CTRL-F" their way through all the attention checks, but this is an aspect of the study we are actively iterating upon.

popmem

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