Hi all, I am writing to you because I need advice regarding a poetry questionnaire that you can find here: Imagery questionnaire (google.com).
As I am now collecting responses, it dawned on me that I don’t know if there is a formula to estimate sample size for questionnaires. I have found some papers online (including the one you recommend in another thread of Concordance) but they are very technical and I don’t know if they apply to my case. So basically this is my design in a nutshell:
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materials: a set of 8 poems; each participant reads 2 poems randomly chosen by the program and answers some questions
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for each poem a mixture of tasks is required, mostly open questions and Likert scales.
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the study is exploratory, the stimuli materials were not chosen according to specific hypotheses (e.g., low vs high imagery poems) but rather to represent the variety of the ‘poems’ population.
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I am interested in poetry reading in general (so the set of 8 poems) but also on each specific poem (to account for differences in style). So I am interested in an item-analysis, not in participant-analysis. I want to see how responses to each poem compare, not how specific individuals or groups of individuals respond to poems.
For now I have 73 responses but I think I need more: so far, each poem has been read, rated and commented by an average of 18 participants. Is it enough? are there any recommended standards?
A related question concerns the recruitment of participants in ways other than word-of-mouth and online postings: I have seen that some studies use either Amazon Mechanical Turk or Crowdflower, but I guess funding is needed in these cases, and I don’t have it, unfortunately. What would you recommend doing?
Thank you in advance for your help!
Davide