Good suggestions re: the questions about reading. Thanks. I’ll change them.
Your comments about real-world successes are good too. Will GPA be more or less country-neutral if I ask for respondants’ percentiles? I’ll throw in an urban vs. rural question next to the question about drivers’ licenses. I agree that “number of best friends” is far from definitive, but then again so is income (not everyone prioritizes money): the idea is to ask about success in hitting many different indicators that some portion of respondants will have aimed for, so as to accumulate many weak indicators (which may together make a stronger indicator) of success in hitting one’s goals.
Do you have other ideas for other questions to include here?
Another nit about drivers’ licenses (full disclosure: I don’t have one, and I live in the USA): from what I’ve seen, drivers’ license as an indicator of “real world success” is a very American phenomenon. Anecdotally, the Europeans I’ve encountered seem significantly less likely than Americans of the same age to have licenses on average, nor is there a stigma (or as much of a stigma) associated with not having one.
Well, not all countries use percentiles, either. Finnish college grades are a number on a scale from 1 to 5 (and high school grades are a scale from 4 to 10), and it depends somewhat on the course and subject how those grades are produced. Some courses, for instance, will pass you if you get 33% of the exam right, others require 50%. In either case, only the grade is recorded, not the percentile.
Rural vs. urban is probably a pretty good control for the license question.
No ideas that I could think from the top of my head, but I’ll comment if anything occurs to me.
You could ask specifically about how important different goals are to people, although this admittedly opens up the possibility of people shifting either their stated goals in response to their stated performance, or vice versa. Having relatively “objective” performance criteria would mitigate the latter, while having the importance questions well before the performance ones could mitigate the latter.
As an alternative it might be possible to combine the two into a single question, something like “How successful have you been in achieving the things that are important to you?” Maybe that’s too subjective, but perhaps it could be made more specific… E.g. “Think about an important goal that you have pursued in the recent past. How successful were you in attaining that goal.” might be workable if the answer options were also specific enough?
Good suggestions re: the questions about reading. Thanks. I’ll change them.
Your comments about real-world successes are good too. Will GPA be more or less country-neutral if I ask for respondants’ percentiles? I’ll throw in an urban vs. rural question next to the question about drivers’ licenses. I agree that “number of best friends” is far from definitive, but then again so is income (not everyone prioritizes money): the idea is to ask about success in hitting many different indicators that some portion of respondants will have aimed for, so as to accumulate many weak indicators (which may together make a stronger indicator) of success in hitting one’s goals.
Do you have other ideas for other questions to include here?
Good suggestions re: the questions about reading. Thanks. I’ll change them.
Your comments about real-world successes are good too. Will GPA be more or less country-neutral if I ask for respondants’ percentiles? I’ll throw in an urban vs. rural question next to the question about drivers’ licenses. I agree that “number of best friends” is far from definitive, but then again so is income (not everyone prioritizes money): the idea is to ask about success in hitting many different indicators that some portion of respondants will have aimed for, so as to accumulate many weak indicators (which may together make a stronger indicator) of success in hitting one’s goals.
Do you have other ideas for other questions to include here?
Another nit about drivers’ licenses (full disclosure: I don’t have one, and I live in the USA): from what I’ve seen, drivers’ license as an indicator of “real world success” is a very American phenomenon. Anecdotally, the Europeans I’ve encountered seem significantly less likely than Americans of the same age to have licenses on average, nor is there a stigma (or as much of a stigma) associated with not having one.
Well, not all countries use percentiles, either. Finnish college grades are a number on a scale from 1 to 5 (and high school grades are a scale from 4 to 10), and it depends somewhat on the course and subject how those grades are produced. Some courses, for instance, will pass you if you get 33% of the exam right, others require 50%. In either case, only the grade is recorded, not the percentile.
Rural vs. urban is probably a pretty good control for the license question.
No ideas that I could think from the top of my head, but I’ll comment if anything occurs to me.
You could ask specifically about how important different goals are to people, although this admittedly opens up the possibility of people shifting either their stated goals in response to their stated performance, or vice versa. Having relatively “objective” performance criteria would mitigate the latter, while having the importance questions well before the performance ones could mitigate the latter.
As an alternative it might be possible to combine the two into a single question, something like “How successful have you been in achieving the things that are important to you?” Maybe that’s too subjective, but perhaps it could be made more specific… E.g. “Think about an important goal that you have pursued in the recent past. How successful were you in attaining that goal.” might be workable if the answer options were also specific enough?
Good suggestions re: the questions about reading. Thanks. I’ll change them.
Your comments about real-world successes are good too. Will GPA be more or less country-neutral if I ask for respondants’ percentiles? I’ll throw in an urban vs. rural question next to the question about drivers’ licenses. I agree that “number of best friends” is far from definitive, but then again so is income (not everyone prioritizes money): the idea is to ask about success in hitting many different indicators that some portion of respondants will have aimed for, so as to accumulate many weak indicators (which may together make a stronger indicator) of success in hitting one’s goals.
Do you have other ideas for other questions to include here?