Pilot Test

After developing the questionnaire there has to be evaluation of each question before final administration a process which is called Pilot test (De Vaus, 2013). The pilot test consists of an additional procedure to increase further the levels of reliability. That procedure includes checking first a small number of people before the actual releasement of the questionnaire to the whole range of the participants. This can assist in assessing the flow of the questions, any possible bottleneck that might appear, if the time is enough for answers, if the questions are clear in what they are asking, if there is a contingency part and if assessing the whole process is realistic and achievable within the interest of the participants (De Vaus, 2002).

It is a vital part as due to the difficulty to forecast the respondents’ understanding to the questions it actually assists in improving the questions by making them more accurate (Gill and Johnson, 2002). Through this method it provides further understanding to the researcher as to how effective the questions are and to what extent those have been perceived in the same way as the researcher that places them. Additionally the researcher can acquire further ideas through the way that respondents answer them. At the end the pilot test not only observe the appropriateness of the questions for an anticipated result but also provides to the researcher the prospect to detect possible content or design flaws and provides options as to how the questions should be rephrased (Altinay and Paraskevas, 2008). It also checks the degree of reliability and validity of it which means that difficulty in understanding them will end up in unreliable results (Finn et al., 2000).

According to De Vaus (2013) the pilot test comprises of 3 stages: the Question development, the Questionnaire development, and Polishing Pilot test.

On the first one the Question development, involves evaluation of the phrasing of each question in order the respondents to have similar understanding with the researcher about what the question is asking and also to check if the variety of alternative replies is adequate. Participants are welcomed to be asked how

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the question should have been stated if the existing meaning creates different perception about what it wants to ask.

Twenty (20) students took place in this pilot study with ten (10) undergraduates and ten (10) postgraduates in order to have a balanced view. On each person a hard copy with the questions was given in order to fill with answers and hand it back to the researcher. The objective of this study was initially to find out if the respondents will answer the questions and then to see if the respondents fully understood what the questions were asking (Finn et al., 2003).

Also it had to be examined the level of variation to see if respondents provide similar answers to a question which in case that this happened it had to be discarded that particular question as it would have made little contribution to its further analysis.

On the Questionnaire development there is further evaluation of individual items and the whole questionnaire. At this stage the comments and the whole feedback provided by the respondents are analysed in order to improve further the questionnaire. The time factor is also considered here as there is effort to estimate how much time will take to answer the whole questionnaire and how many questions should be included in order the whole response time to be remaining within reasonable amount of time (De Vaus, 2013).

There were no signs of vagueness in all the 20 respondents as there was no question asked about a particular part of the questionnaire that had to be cleared further. In most cases the response rate time was approximately 20 minutes. One small mistake only came after the collection of the questionnaire and had to do with question QB2 as some of the respondents answered all the parts of these question which wasn’t necessary. The amendment action was to replace one part of the description of the question with capital letters (Please tick…ONLY THOSE ITEMS FROM THE FOLLOWING LIST THAT YOU RECEIVED FROM THE AIRLINE during…) as this worked much better with regard to the time factor (speed up the process) and reduced completely any signs of vagueness as to how many of the following 16 recovering strategies the respondents should they have to circle (See Appendix xx the questionnaire).

Finally on the 3rd stage, the Polishing pilot test, issues such as revision of questions, reorder of them, shortening the questionnaire, attention to the final layout of it take place here in order to have as much clarity as possible to the respondents (De Vaus, 2013).

In question QB3 there were 5 positive and 5 negative emotions placed and some rewording in some of them took place to have further clarification on each of those 10 different stages of emotion for the respondents to facilitate even more accuracy about a particular choice.

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Further some rewording took place in question QB5 (level of agreement) to have even more clarity in each of the options provided for answer.

De Vaus (2013) suggests 5 points to be examined: Variation, Meaning, Redundancy, Scalability, and Non-response. Apart from the Variation that is referred in Question development (as the 20 participants’ answers were checked in the case of a possible discard if similar answers appear something which didn’t happen); the rest 4 had their appliance in the current research as follows:

The Redundancy point didn’t appeared as there was no redundancy issue in a particular question. Regarding the Meaning, indeed the participants understood the meaning of each question (with only one amendment referred above on QB2). On Scalability which examines the design of the question to apply scale type they did ensure that they do so. Finally the Non-response point in the pilot test was not an issue, all responded satisfactory. Only later after the final version of the questionnaire was released to the streets were a significant number of respondents that didn’t reply the second-third and final fourth page and that due to their limited interest of time (no more than 5 min on average) something which was beyond the scope of this PhD research as within 5 min it is impossible to answer 20 questions in a high quality standard and have satisfactory amount of data at this level.