Methodology

The My Voice™ Survey was designed to assess various aspects of student aspirations by asking students to respond to a number of statements about their perceptions of their school, as well as school-related self-perceptions regarding the 8 Conditions and the three Guiding Principles.

In particular, the Guiding Principles focus on students’ internal cognitive, behavioral, and emotional experiences in and related to school, which are assessed via a subset of the My Voice Survey items. These items have been shown by way of analyses employing a set of advanced statistical techniques (including both exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses) to comprise reliable and valid measures of the Guiding Principles. Reliability suggests that the items that were established to represent each Guiding Principle hold together well; that is, the students’ responses to each of the items representing each Guiding Principle are likely to be very similar. Validity suggests that students’ scores on each of the measures of the Guiding Principles are likely to be reasonably highly correlated with each other – as they should be, given that the three Guiding Principles together reflect the broader notion of student aspirations. At the same time, they are not so highly correlated as to suggest that they are indistinguishable. The empirical validation study supporting these statements can be found on QISA’s website.