How to score a questionnaire

Psychologists frequently use psychometric scales to collect quantitative data from participants about attitudes, behaviours, personality characteristics, and so on. When using psychometric scales, you must ensure you know how to score said scale. This page is going to show you how to score a scale using the Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD-7) scale.

The first thing you will need to do is acquire access to your scale and the scoring information. For the convenience of this guide, you can access the GAD-7 by clicking ‘here‘. The GAD-7 is a published and validated scale, these attributes are important for a scale to be used in research. By looking at the GAD-7 you can see that it is a 7-item questionnaire. Items are scored on a 0-3 scale. 0 representing “Not as all”. 1 representing “Several days”. 3 representing “More than half the days”. 4 representing “Nearly every day”. The GAD-7 is scored by totalling the responses into one score. That total score presents the severity of anxiety, with higher scores indicating more anxiety.

The GAD-7 is a nice introduction to scoring questionnaires because of its simplicity. When finding your own questionnaires, be sure to thoroughly read the scoring information and take note of any reverse scoring or additional calculations that may be present.

GAD-7 reference:
Spitzer, R. L., Kroenke, K., Williams, J. B., & Löwe, B. (2006). A brief measure for assessing generalized anxiety disorder: the GAD-7. Archives of internal medicine, 166(10), 1092–1097. https://doi.org/10.1001/archinte.166.10.1092