<p>If you have found a fitting instrument that measures your interest and has been validated but is a bit too long, what can you do to shorten it?</p>

<p>Edit: </p>

<p>How do you reduce the number of questions within a questionnaire/instrument not the variables? As in, are there any set procedures that one needs to follow. The questionnaire in queestion is the Academic Self-Regulated Learning Scale (Mango 2010). The aim is to reduce it 20 -25 questions. </p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2019-01-05T22:43:55.007Z
Without more detail, this sounds like you want to perform https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimensionality_reduction or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feature_selection
Justas
CC BY-SA 4.0
2019-01-08T14:52:26.093Z
@user21242 yes: item-response theory. select the items based on difficulty and discrimination.
faustus
CC BY-SA 4.0
2022-03-28T20:56:09.293Z
You can follow the process in an [example](https://doi.org/10.1093/ijpor/edz049) I was reading recently, that indeed uses IRT.  If you already have discrimination and difficulty for each item, then you can probably make reasonably educated guesses about what to cut out, but the shortenend instrument should ideally be re-validated.
Arnon Weinberg
<measurement><methodology>
Is there a specified way to shorten the number of questions in an instrument/questionnaire?
user21208
# Is there a specified way to shorten the number of questions in an instrument/questionnaire?

(Asked by: username_0 on 2019-01-03)

If you have found a fitting instrument that measures your interest and has been validated but is a bit too long, what can you do to shorten it?

Edit:

How do you reduce the number of questions within a questionnaire/instrument not the variables? As in, are there any set procedures that one needs to follow. The questionnaire in queestion is the Academic Self-Regulated Learning Scale (Mango 2010). The aim is to reduce it 20 -25 questions.

**Tags:** measurement, methodology

> **Comments:**
> **username_1**: Without more detail, this sounds like you want to perform https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimensionality_reduction or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feature_selection  
> **username_2**: @user21242 yes: item-response theory. select the items based on difficulty and discrimination.  
> **username_3**: You can follow the process in an [example](https://doi.org/10.1093/ijpor/edz049) I was reading recently, that indeed uses IRT.  If you already have discrimination and difficulty for each item, then you can probably make reasonably educated guesses about what to cut out, but the shortenend instrument should ideally be re-validated.  

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## 0 answers

