A BS Psychology thesis almost never needs a researcher-made questionnaire. The constructs psychology students study in the Philippines — stress, anxiety, depressive symptoms, self-esteem, burnout, academic motivation — already have published scales with known reliability, published norms and, in several cases, Filipino translations. Choosing one of them well is a bigger methodological decision than building your own instrument, and it is the decision a panel with a psychometrician on it will examine first.
This guide takes you from the construct named in your statement of the problem to a scale you can legally use, correctly cite and defensibly score, in ten steps. Each step states the output you should have before moving on. Your department’s research manual and your adviser outrank anything here; some psychology programs restrict certain instruments to licensed psychometricians under the Philippine Psychology Act, so confirm the rule in your own college before you commit.
Step 1: Name the construct exactly as your statement of the problem does
Expected output: one construct per sub-problem, each with the dimensions you intend to measure.
Open your statement of the problem and list every psychological variable it asks about. Write the construct and its dimensions, not the topic. Stress is a topic. Perceived stress over the past month is a construct with a known scale. Depression, anxiety and stress as three separate subscales is a construct with a different known scale. The scale you pick has to measure what the sub-problem asks, dimension for dimension, because a panel will read your instrument against your problems line by line.
Step 2: Find the scale in its original publication, not in a blog
Expected output: the original journal article or manual for each candidate scale, saved as a PDF.
Search for the construct plus the word scale or inventory in Google Scholar, then trace every hit back to the article that first published the instrument. That article is where the item wording, the response format, the scoring rule and the original reliability figures live, and it is the reference you must cite. Philippine validation studies are worth a second search in local databases, because a scale that has already been validated with Filipino respondents gives you a much stronger Chapter 3 paragraph; the roundup of databases that actually hold Philippine studies lists the ones that index them.
Step 3: Read the permission terms before you fall in love with the scale
Expected output: for each candidate, a one-line note saying whether it is free to use, free with conditions, or licensed for a fee.
This is the step most groups skip, and the one that stops a thesis at the ethics review. The six scales below are the ones Philippine psychology theses reach for most often; free to use is not the same as free to modify, and the terms are the rights holders’ own as of this writing, so open the page yourself and save a screenshot for your appendix.
| Scale | Original source | Permission status, as stated by the rights holder | What to do |
|---|---|---|---|
| Depression Anxiety Stress Scales (DASS-42 and DASS-21) | Lovibond and Lovibond (1995), Psychology Foundation of Australia | Public domain; the DASS website at the University of New South Wales states it may be downloaded from the site and hosts translations | Use freely, cite the manual, download the scale and any translation from the official site rather than a reupload |
| Perceived Stress Scale (PSS-10) | Cohen, Kamarck and Mermelstein (1983) | Permission is not required for nonprofit academic research or educational use, per the Cohen laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University; commercial and some clinical uses are now handled by a distributor | Use freely for a student thesis, cite the 1983 article, keep the original wording |
| Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9) | Kroenke, Spitzer and Williams (2001), developed with a grant from Pfizer | No permission required to reproduce, translate, display or distribute; translations are listed on the PHQ screeners site | Use freely; check the screeners site for an existing Filipino version before translating your own |
| Generalized Anxiety Disorder scale (GAD-7) | Spitzer, Kroenke, Williams and Löwe (2006) | Same terms as the PHQ-9: no permission required | Use freely; cite the 2006 article |
| Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (RSES) | Rosenberg (1965) | May be used without charge or permission; the Morris Rosenberg Foundation, through the University of Maryland Department of Sociology, asks to be sent a copy of published work that uses it | Use freely, cite the 1965 book, and note the Foundation’s request in your acknowledgements |
| Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI, including the student version) | Maslach and Jackson (1981) | Licensed through Mind Garden; a licence must be purchased, and translations are supplied with the licence | Budget for it as a group, or choose a freely available burnout measure; never reproduce the items from a secondary source |
Step 4: Decide between adopting, adapting and translating
Expected output: one of three words written next to each scale, with the reason.
Adopt means you use the scale exactly as published: same items, same order, same response options, same instructions. This is the strongest position, because the reliability and validity evidence from the original study and from Philippine validation studies transfers to your use of it. Adopt whenever you can.
Adapt means you change something — a word, a referent, a time frame, the number of items. The moment you do, the published psychometric evidence no longer strictly applies and you owe the panel a new reliability figure from your own pilot. Adapting a licensed scale without written permission may also breach the licence. Adapt only when the original wording genuinely does not fit your respondents, and document every change in a table in Chapter 3.
Translate means producing a Filipino, Cebuano or Ilocano version. Check first whether an official translation exists; the DASS and PHQ sites both host translations. If none exists, use forward translation by one bilingual translator, blind back-translation by a second, reconciliation by a small committee, and a pilot — the procedure generally credited to Brislin (1970).
Step 5: Write the permission request, even when permission is not required
Expected output: a sent email and, where the rights holder replies, a saved reply.
For free scales this is a courtesy that also produces evidence for your appendix. For licensed scales it is mandatory. The message that gets a reply is short and specific.
Subject: Request to use the [Scale Name] in an undergraduate thesis. Dear Dr. [Surname], I am a fourth-year BS Psychology student at [University], Philippines. I request permission to use the [Scale Name] as published in [citation], [unchanged / with the following changes], among [respondents] in [locale] during [term]. The study is unfunded and for academic purposes only; the scale will appear in the thesis appendix with full attribution. Respectfully, [Name], [adviser’s name and email].
Step 6: Pilot it and compute reliability with your own respondents
Expected output: a Cronbach’s alpha per subscale from 20 to 30 pilot respondents who will not be in your final sample.
Even an adopted scale should be piloted, because your respondents are not the original authors’ respondents. Encode the pilot data and compute alpha per subscale, not for the whole instrument; the DASS-21, for example, has three subscales and needs three alphas. The menu path and the item-total table you need are in the guide to analysing thesis data in SPSS step by step.
Step 7: Write the instrument section with the citation in APA 7th
Expected output: a Chapter 3 paragraph per scale, plus a reference entry.
The paragraph names the scale, its author and year, what it measures, how many items it has, the response format, the scoring rule, the published reliability, the permission status and your pilot reliability, in that order. A filled-in version for an adopted scale:
Depression, anxiety and stress were measured using the 21-item Depression Anxiety Stress Scales (DASS-21; Lovibond & Lovibond, 1995). Each of the three subscales contains seven items rated on a four-point scale from 0 (did not apply to me at all) to 3 (applied to me very much or most of the time). Subscale scores are summed and multiplied by two to allow comparison with DASS-42 norms, and interpreted using the severity categories published in the manual. The scale is in the public domain and was downloaded from the developers’ website. In the present study’s pilot administration to 30 students excluded from the final sample, the subscales yielded Cronbach’s alpha coefficients of .86 (depression), .79 (anxiety) and .84 (stress).
The reference entry follows the pattern for a manual published by an organisation:
Lovibond, S. H., & Lovibond, P. F. (1995). Manual for the Depression Anxiety Stress Scales (2nd ed.). Psychology Foundation of Australia.
For a journal-published scale, cite the article, with the DOI and no trailing period after it. The section sits inside the Chapter 3 template set out in the guide to writing Chapter 3 section by section, under the research instrument heading.
Step 8: Score it the authors’ way, not the weighted-mean way
Expected output: a scoring plan that uses the published cut-offs or norms.
This is where psychology theses go wrong most visibly. Philippine research manuals teach a Likert habit: compute a weighted mean per item, then interpret it with ranges such as 3.26 to 4.00 equals very high. That convention belongs to researcher-made questionnaires, where it is described in full in the guide to building a questionnaire item by item. A standardized scale already has a scoring rule, and applying weighted-mean ranges to it throws away the very norms that made you choose it.
So the DASS-21 is summed and doubled and read against its severity bands. The PSS-10 reverse-scores four items and sums to a score from 0 to 40. The PHQ-9 sums to 0 to 27 with published severity cut-points. The RSES reverse-scores five items and sums. Reproduce the rule from the original article, state it in Chapter 3, and let your Chapter 4 tables report the total scores and the proportion of respondents in each published category.
Step 9: Plan for what the scale can reveal
Expected output: a distress protocol written into your ethics application and your consent form.
Clinical screening scales are not neutral. The PHQ-9 contains an item about thoughts of self-harm; the DASS and GAD-7 can surface distress a respondent has not disclosed to anyone. The Psychological Association of the Philippines’ code of ethics and your university’s research ethics committee will expect you to say what happens when a respondent scores in the severe range.
The workable undergraduate protocol has three parts. The consent form states that the questionnaire asks about mood and stress and lists the campus guidance office and a national crisis line as resources. The researcher does not diagnose; scores are research data, and the form says so. And the group agrees in advance, with the adviser, on whether respondents may ask for their own scores and how a referral to the guidance office is offered without breaching confidentiality. Write the protocol before data collection, not after the first alarming questionnaire comes back.
The same consent text and resources belong on the first page of an online form; the delivery trade-offs, including what the Data Privacy Act actually requires of a student researcher, are compared in the guide to Google Forms versus paper for thesis data collection.
Step 10: Assemble the appendix
Expected output: the instrument appendix a panel can audit in two minutes.
Include, in order: the scale exactly as administered with your consent statement on top; the permission page or email; the scoring key as published; your translation and back-translation, if any; and the pilot reliability output. A panel that can see permission, scoring key and alpha without asking usually moves on to the next chapter.
Draft the instrument section around the scale you chose
Tesify drafts your Chapter 3 research instrument section from the scale details you supply — author, year, items, scoring rule, permission status, pilot reliability — in the order a Philippine panel expects, and builds the APA 7th reference entry for the original article or manual as you go. Over 9,000 students have used it to write more than 15,000 chapters, and every word is still written by you.
Start your psychology thesis on Tesify · Build the reference entry with the automatic bibliography
Frequently asked questions
Do I need permission to use a standardized scale in my thesis?
It depends on the scale. The DASS, PHQ-9, GAD-7 and Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale are published as free to use without permission; the Perceived Stress Scale is free for nonprofit academic research; the Maslach Burnout Inventory requires a paid licence. Check the rights holder’s own page on the day you decide and save it for your appendix.
Can I change the wording of a standardized scale?
Only with a reason, and only after checking that the licence allows it. Any change means the published reliability no longer applies, so you must pilot the adapted version and report your own Cronbach’s alpha. Document every change in a table in Chapter 3.
Can I use the weighted mean to interpret a standardized scale?
No. A standardized scale has a published scoring rule and cut-offs, and interpreting it with weighted-mean ranges discards those norms. Sum the items as the authors instruct and report the total scores and the published categories.
Is there a Filipino translation of the scale I want?
Often, yes. The DASS and PHQ sites host translations, and Philippine validation studies exist for several common scales. Search the official site and local databases first; translate only if nothing exists, and use forward translation, blind back-translation and a pilot.
What do I do if a respondent scores in the severe range?
Follow the distress protocol you wrote into your ethics application: you do not diagnose, the consent form has already listed the guidance office and a crisis line, and any referral is offered through the channel your adviser approved. Write the protocol before data collection.
How do I cite a scale in APA 7th?
Cite the original article or manual, not the website where you downloaded it, unless the website is the only source. Name the scale, author and year in the Chapter 3 text, and give the full entry in the reference list with a DOI where one exists.