LibQUAL+ ™ Lite

LibQUAL+™ has served the academic library community well with over 1,000 participating libraries and over 1 million respondents since 1999. However, there has been a growing desire within the community of users for a briefer version of the survey. With 34 questions, including optional selections, in the full LibQUAL+™ survey, libraries have reported significant numbers of respondents who start but do not complete the survey. Other potential respondents may also have declined to take the survey because of its size. LibQUAL+™ Lite has been developed by ARL to address these concerns.

Recommended Options for LibQUAL Canada Participants

While individual consortium members are free to choose different options (differing percentages of respondents who take LibQUAL+™ Lite vs full LibQUAL+™), to minimize variations in comparing results among participating libraries, CARL asks that consortial participants choose either 50/50 LibQUAL+™ Lite and full LibQUAL+™ option or a 100% LibQUAL+™ Lite option.

Methodology

LibQUAL+™ Lite uses matrix sampling. Matrix sampling is a survey method that can be used to collect data on all survey items without requiring every participant to react to every survey question. With this approach all of the LibQUAL+™ questions will still be asked but not of every respondent.

LibQUAL+™ Lite Described In Brief

No LibQUAL+™ Lite respondent will have to answer more than 19 questions (not counting demographic items) as opposed to 34 questions for the full LibQUAL+™ survey.

1. Basic Questions

3 questions will be common to all the LibQUAL+™ Lite surveys (one from each of the three service dimensions).
8 questions will be randomly selected by the LibQUAL+™ system, for each respondent in the following manner:
- 2 questions randomly selected from the remaining 8 Affect of Service questions
- 2 questions randomly selected from the remaining 7 Information Control questions
- 1 question randomly selected from the remaining 4 Library as Place questions

2. Optional Questions

1 question randomly selected from the library's 5 optional questions (if the library chooses to include 5 optional questions)

3. General Satisfaction questions

2 questions randomly selected from the General Satisfaction questions

4. Information Literacy Outcomes questions

2 questions randomly selected from the Information Literacy Outcomes questions

5. Library Use questions

All 3 Library Use questions

6. Comments

The comments box

How Does a library select LibQUAL+™ Lite?

In January 2010, when each library enters its options for the survey, they will have an option to select what percentage of the library's total respondents will randomly receive a LibQUAL+™ Lite survey as opposed to a full survey. The percentage can be from 0 to 100%. For libraries who have done the survey before, ARL recommend a 50% distribution between Lite and full surveys. This would allow those libraries to compare their 2010 results with their past results all of the survey questions. Libraries new to LibQUAL+™ might as well select 100% LibQUAL+™ Lite.

Finding With LibQUAL+™ Lite

ARL's findings to date indicate a large increase in the percentage of respondents who complete the survey with LibQUAL+™ Lite. However, ARL's analysis of the test libraries' results indicate that there is some difference in the mean scores between LibQUAL+™ Lite respondents and full LibQUAL+™ respondents. Since there are significantly more respondents for LibQUAL+™ Lite, ARL's researchers (Bruce Thompson, Martha Kyrillidou and Colleen Cook) concluded that the aggregate mean scores for the LibQUAL+™ Lite results may, in fact, be more accurate: (Thompson, B., Kyrillidou, M., & Cook, C. (2009). Item sampling in service quality assessment surveys to improve response rates and reduce respondent burden: The "LibQUAL+ Lite" example. Performance Measurement & Metrics, 10(1), 6-16. ).