As a researcher on a study, hypothetically, I want to create a scale assessing how much nurses who were providing double duty care giving were blurring boundaries between their duties at work and their care giving at home. They included 7 questions, all in the same ordinal (likert) type measurement of strongly agree, agree, neutral, disagree and strongly disagree, related to this extent of additional care giving at home.
I must create a new scale for the researcher by taking the average of each of those 7 items and then providing some descriptive statistics for the new scale, called the Care Giving Interface, which is meant to assess the overall extent of double-duty care giving that nurses experience. As part of my scale analysis, determine how well the 7 items appear to measure the same overall construct of the extent of double-duty care giving.
How can I take my 7 items and combine them into one new variable? I know that once I make the new scale, I can do a descriptive statistical analysis and generate the overall mean etc, but I do not know how to combine the various items into one variable.