Prevalence of attributes of dyslexia

• Despite sending requests to almost all of the 132 UK HE institutions, questionnaire replies were received from only 30 respondents - which although seemed disappointing, it did represent a return rate of approximately 27% which is close to the average return rate of 33% reported in a short meta-analysis of response rates to online surveys in universities (Nulty, 2008). A more recent meta-analysis that focuses on response rates in online surveys conducted in post-2006 research has not been found so it is not known whether new HTML5 technologies - such as input sliders used in my questionnaire as a replacement for anchor-point Likert scales - has had an impact on response rates.
  
  
• To gain a more meaningful overview of the data collected about the prevalence of dyslexia dimensions, results were scaled up to a theoretical 100 student interactions per respondent which generates a total virtual student interactions 'community' of n = 3000. From this, mean average interactions for each of the 18 dimensions could be calculated based on the questionnaire replies received. For example, given 3000 student interactions, those in which 'students say that they often use the wrong word for their intended meaning' would be recorded 1433 times.
  
  
• The percentage prevalence rates were crucially used as weightings for calculating Dyslexia Index in the main research questionnaire where all of the 18 dimensions were included in the metric.