Online Survey-based Research Using Likert-Scale Questionnaire as an Educational Tool during COVID-19: From Design and Development to Validation Process and Interpretation

Background: It is crucial for the faculty in teaching institution to research and publish during COVID pandemic besides, teaching and assessing in medical education. It is an opportunity for faculty to conduct questionnaire based research and learn about survey based research design and its validation. It has been found that most of the researchers rely on published questionnaire though; designing a questionnaire is a good research practice to start with. It may pay off the researchers in many ways in future. Keeping with researcher?s incentives of readers and difficulties they may encounter in creating questionnaire-based research and its usability, author is obliged to write this paper and share his knowledge and skills with those interested to learn, how to produce validated instruments for survey-based research. Objective: To learn how to create a validated questionnaire from design to validation process and its usability in research. Method: Emphases on questionnaire-based research in this paper will focus on creation of items in a questionnaire using survey design and its validation using a fictitious data. In current questionnaire-based survey research data is collected on a fifteen items scale score measured on a Likert scale from 1 to 4, where 1 represents strongly disagree, 2 disagree, 3 agree and 4 strongly agree. Paper will discusses the entire steps of validation of questionnaire-based research and its usability in detail. Result: A flow chart developed in the process portrays the entire process of creation, validation and usability of questionnaire. A fictitious data created to write this paper has generated a number of tables including content validity indices, reliability indices and a number of factor analysis matrix. Conclusion: The current paper described how to create a questionnaire based survey-research and its validation in detail, which may help readers and new researchers to understand descriptive type of research using survey design, specially explored for faculty interested to develop their research skills during COVID-19 pandemic and share their experiences with global community.