The Journal of College and University Student Housing - Volume 43, No. 2 - 17

Development, Validity, and Reliability of the Campus Residential Experience Survey

measures relate to other constructs on the
instrument, and external data. (p. 47)
Although we use evidence such as correlations produced through exploratory factor
analysis to validate our instrument, we also
incorporate knowledge from the literature,
knowledge from professional experts, and
theory about survey responses when developing and validating the Campus Residential Experience Survey. Literature on the educational
potential of residential environments was the
basis for creating items for the instrument
(Brower & Inkelas, 2010; Schroeder & Mable,
1994; Schudde, 2011).
To address content validity, the instrument
was distributed to a focus group of campus
administrators at a single institution. Participants of the focus group purposely included
residence life professionals, student affairs
professionals not working in residence life,
and administrators who were not in student
affairs but were knowledgeable about higher
education administration in general. Participants in the focus group provided feedback
on their ability to comprehend items and on
the extent to which an item clearly conveyed
what it attempted to measure (e.g., importance
of living on campus). Feedback from the focus
group pertained to item readability and clarity,
and this information was used to refine items
on the instrument.
We based the development of the Campus
Residential Experience Survey on Tourangeau,
Rips, and Rasinski's (2000) philosophical
model originally proposed by Cannell, Miller,
and Oksenberg (1981): the ComprehensionRetrieval-Judgment-Response model. This
model purports that responders must understand the questions and link them to relevant

Although we use evidence such
as correlations produced through
exploratory factor analysis to validate
our instrument, we also incorporate
knowledge from the literature,
knowledge from professional experts,
and theory about survey responses
when developing and validating the
Campus Residential Experience Survey.

concepts (comprehension), retrieve specific
and generic memories (retrieval), draw inferences based on accessibility (judgment), and
map the judgment onto the response category
(response) (Tourangeau et al., 2000).
Structure of instrument. The Campus
Residential Experience Survey is comprised
of eight scales divided into two groups: Four
scales measure current status and four scales
measure desired status of four unique latent
constructs. The scales are 1) Institutional importance of students living on campus, 2) The
role of residence life professionals as educators,
3) Faculty engagement in residential environments, and 4) The facility design of residential environments (see Table 2). Each of these
scales utilizes Likert-type response categories
in a testlet format. As Wainer and Kiely (1987)
noted, "A testlet is a group of items related to a
single content area that is developed as a unit
and contains a fixed number of predetermined
paths that an examinee may follow" (p. 190).
Utilizing testlets, the instrument presents a
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The Journal of College and University Student Housing - Volume 43, No. 2

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