The Effect of Behavioral Finance on Stock Investment Decisions

Selecting the tool of the data collection depends on many factors like the availability of facilities, the researcher expertise, the degree of needed accuracy, the time frame for the study, and the availability of costs and resources to conduct the data collection process. The researchers developed a questionnaire that was distributed among the investors at ASE to measure the behavioral finance factors that affect stock investment decision- making process.

The survey consisted of (33) items, representing the research variables, all items of the questionnaire were measured by a 5-point Likert scale with anchors ranging from 1=strongly disagree to 5=strongly agree.

Then the choices were identified along the five Likert scale (lower and upper limits) as follows:

1. Arithmetic mean was considered normal (default) if the answer was (3) and represented a "neutral".
2. The range was calculated according to the following equation: highest weight minus the lowest weight=(5- 1=4)
3. The division mean for answers to five degrees represented a degree of agreement (strongly disagree, disagree, neutral, agree and strongly agree).
4. The length of the cell was calculated according to the following equation: Range ÷ number of levels=length of the cell 4÷3=1.33.
5. Added value of the length of the cell (1.33) to the beginning of the scale (the lowest value in the scale, namely, (1)) to determine the upper limit for the first cell (Valerie Hall, 2007), and thus became the length of the cells as shown in Table 1.