Clearly, there is a strong judgmental factor (social desirability) to be assigned to this question. It is better to be successful than unsuccessful when engaging in coaching and to have reached your potential rather than to have not begun to realize your potential. In a long questionnaire such as this one, response fatigue is also likely to settle in by question 27 or 28, and respondents are often likely to simply move to one end of the response spectrum (usually the positive end). This acquiescence response set can be particularly prevalent when the survey requires no more than clicking of the mouse on a specific response bullet.
Given these concerns, it is legitimate to provide a comparative analysis–looking at means in terms of not just their absolute value, but also their value in comparison with the mean scores on other items listed within a specific question. We will approach the mean scores for this first question from both the absolute and comparative perspectives.
There is not as much of a problem in making sense of the variance scores. In many ways, this is the most interesting descriptive statistic when considering the meaning of scores in a questionnaire such as this one–which was completed by a diverse set of respondents. The variance scores tell you about the extent to which respondents tend to agree with one another. A low variance scores indicates that there is a high level of agreement, whereas a high variance score indicates low levels of agreement (and potential controversy). Some caution does have to be engaged when interpreting variance scores, for an item that pulls for social desirability or acquiescence tends to “squish” everyone at one end of the scale: there is not a higher (or lower) point on the scale when respondents are making their choice.
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