A Structured Workflow for Screening, Scoring, and Visualizing Undergraduate Student Well-Being Questionnaire Data

Summary

This protocol demonstrates a structured and auditable workflow for processing anonymized undergraduate well-being questionnaire data, from raw export and response screening to scale scoring, reliability checking, regression diagnostics, figure-source verification, and visualization-ready analytic outputs.

Abstract

Questionnaire-based studies are widely used to examine student well-being, but the procedural route from raw responses to analyzable variables, statistical tables, and visual outputs is often insufficiently documented. This protocol demonstrates a structured and auditable workflow for processing anonymized undergraduate well-being questionnaire data collected with multiple Likert-type scale sections. The workflow begins with ethics approval, consent documentation, questionnaire configuration, and raw-data export, and then proceeds through response screening, duplicate-response review, missing-data handling, item coding, reverse scoring, reliability assessment, descriptive analysis, correlation analysis, contrastive group comparison, regression modeling, diagnostic checking, and visualization-source preparation. The example questionnaire uses source-documented and study-adapted scale sections informed by the Depression Anxiety Stress Scales-21, Tuckman Procrastination Scale, Psychological Sense of School Membership Scale, higher-order thinking measurement literature, and subjective well-being scale documentation. Negative emotion, academic procrastination, school belongingness, higher-order thinking, and subjective well-being are used as example scale-level variables to show how item-level responses can be converted into traceable analytic outputs. Representative outputs include a screening-flow table, demographic summary, descriptive and range-verification statistics, internal-consistency estimates, a correlation matrix, contrastive comparison results, regression coefficients, residual and influence diagnostics, and figure-source files. The protocol emphasizes prespecified decision rules, a linked scale map, a pre-analysis screening log, reverse-scoring verification, and numerical-source verification for figures. Rather than proposing a new psychometric scale, validating a measurement model, or establishing causal relationships, this method provides a practical and auditable procedure for researchers who need to screen, score, analyze, and visualize questionnaire-based undergraduate well-being data. The workflow may be adapted to related questionnaire-based studies when the scale map, ethics approval, scoring rules, response-screening thresholds, and visualization-source files are defined before analysis.

Introduction

Subjective well-being is an important outcome in student research because it reflects how students evaluate their lives, emotional experiences, social relationships, and daily functioning within learning environments. In higher education, student well-being is multidimensional rather than limited to life satisfaction or psychological distress alone¹. Questionnaire data, therefore, remain useful when researchers need to examine emotional, behavioral, social, cognitive, and well-being-related experiences within the same analytic framework.

The value of questionnaire data depends not only on the constructs selected but ....

Protocol

This study involving human participants was reviewed and approved by the Ethics Committee of the College of Aeronautics, Guizhou Open University (Approval No. GZOU-EDU-2024-015). The committee determined that the study qualified for ethical exemption because it used anonymous, voluntary questionnaire procedures and posed no more than minimal risk to participants. All participants provided electronic informed consent before completing the questionnaire and could stop answering at any time without penalty. Because several items addressed negative emotions, stress, loneliness, helplessness, dissatisfaction, or related well-being experiences, the consent page and final qu....

Results

Analytic dataset generated after response screening
The response-screening workflow generated an analytic dataset of 420 anonymized student records from 448 submitted questionnaires. The screening log recorded each decision point. Six records were removed because consent or eligibility requirements were not met, five duplicate submissions were removed, four records were excluded because more than 20% of all scale items were missing, and 13 records were excluded because they met two or more response-q.......

Discussion

This protocol standardizes a common but often underreported process in questionnaire-based well-being studies: the movement from raw response records to screened data, scored scale variables, statistical outputs, and visualization-ready files. Its contribution is not the development of a new subjective well-being theory or the proposal of a causal model. Instead, the workflow provides an auditable route for questionnaire configuration, response screening, scale scoring, reliability checking, descriptive analysis, associa.......

Materials

List of materials used in this article

Name	Company	Catalog Number	Comments
broom R package	CRAN	R package	Used to convert regression outputs into structured coefficient and model-summary tables.
car R package	CRAN	R package	Used for variance inflation factor verification and regression diagnostic support.
Depression Anxiety Stress Scales-21 source documentation	Psychology Foundation of Australia	Lovibond and Lovibond, 1995	Source documentation for the negative emotion section. The workflow used study-adapted wording aligned with recent negative emotional-state assessment.
dplyr R package	CRAN	R package	Used for data filtering, recoding, grouping, screening-flow summaries, and analytic table preparation.
ggplot2 R package	CRAN	R package	Used to generate the correlation heatmap, subjective well-being correlation plot, regression coefficient plot, and diagnostic display.
Higher-order thinking measurement source documentation	Springer Nature	DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-70908-3	Source documentation for the higher-order thinking section. The workflow used a study-adapted item set aligned with analytical, evaluative, reflective, integrative, and evidence-based thinking.
IBM SPSS Statistics	IBM Corp.	Version 29.0.2.0	Used for descriptive statistics, Cronbach’s alpha, Pearson correlation, independent-samples and Welch’s t-tests, multiple linear regression, Durbin-Watson statistic, standardized residuals, leverage values, Cook’s distance, and variance inflation factors.
psych R package	CRAN	R package	Used for psychometric summaries, Cronbach’s alpha verification, and McDonald’s omega.
Psychological Sense of School Membership Scale source documentation	Wiley	Psychol Sch. 1993;30(1):79-90	Source documentation for the school belongingness section. The workflow used study-adapted wording aligned with perceived acceptance, connection, support, and belonging in the school environment.
R statistical environment	R Foundation for Statistical Computing	Version 4.4.2	Used for secondary analytic verification, McDonald’s omega, Spearman sensitivity checks, regression-output preparation, diagnostic-output preparation, and visualization-source preparation.
readxl R package	CRAN	R package	Used to import spreadsheet questionnaire exports into the R verification workflow.
Subjective Well-being Scale for Chinese Citizens source documentation	Scientific & Academic Publishing	DOI: 10.5923/j.ijap.20190905.01	Source documentation for the subjective well-being section. The workflow used study-adapted wording and reverse-scored items aligned with life satisfaction, meaning, support, progress, dissatisfaction, helplessness, and stress-related well-being experiences.
Supplementary File 1: Questionnaire structure and scale documentation	Authors	Supplementary File 1	Provides the administered questionnaire structure, construct order, scale provenance, item codes, response anchors, scoring direction, reverse-scoring rules, scale-level score construction, and documentation-status information.
Tuckman Procrastination Scale source documentation	SAGE Publications	Educ Psychol Meas. 1991;51(2):473-480	Source documentation for the academic procrastination section. The workflow used study-adapted wording aligned with academic delay and task-postponement behavior.
Wenjuanxing online questionnaire platform	Changsha Ranxing Information Technology Co., Ltd.	Web-based platform	Used for electronic consent, questionnaire programming, item response collection, timestamp capture, completion-duration recording, duplicate-submission review, and raw-response export.