Melissa Gordon Wolf

Melissa Gordon Wolf presenting during the GGSE Grad Slam

Melissa Gordon Wolf, doctoral student in the Department of Education at the Gevirtz School, will compete in the semi-final round of the 2019 UC Santa Barbara’s Graduate Student Showcase Grad Slam. Wolf will compete on Monday, April 15, 11 am - 12 pm in SRB Multipurpose Room. The event is free and open to the public. In these Grad Slam events, graduate students have the chance to tell the campus about their research or share their thoughts on big ideas that matter, in just a three-minute talk. Wolf hopes to make it to the final round and have a chance at the grand prize of $5,000.

Her talk is “Survey Item Validation.” Self-report surveys are ubiquitous in our personal lives and research, and the results can have high stakes consequences. Yet, we’ve all encountered moments where we’ve thought to ourselves: “none of these response options apply to me” or “what does this item mean?” Insofar as these moments occur, the validity of a survey’s uses and interpretations is threatened. This presentation will introduce a new, evidence-based method for constructing, testing, and validating self-report survey items.