Toward Better Measurement: The Role of Survey Marginalia in Critical Sexuality Research Sara I. McClelland and Kathryn J. Holland University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Comments left by participants in the margins of a survey are commonly ignored during data analysis. Rather than overlook these marginalia, we describe a qualitative analysis of the notes, underlines, and cross-outs left by participants in the margins of the Female Sexual Function Index (FSFI; Rosen et al., 2000). Participants who were diagnosed with late stage breast cancer had taken the FSFI as part of a larger multimethod quality of life study. In our analysis, we identify 3 categories to analyze the 136 instances of marginalia left next to FSFI items: clarifications, corrections, and noting items as “not applicable.” Using these marginalia as guidance, we developed a modified scoring procedure for the FSFI that accounted for those participants who marked items as “not applicable” in their marginalia but would have been dropped from analysis due to missing data. We offer guidelines for researchers interested in analyzing marginalia as a means to incorporate and amplify participant feedback in survey research design. This is especially important when even well-validated instruments are used to make, for example, clinical diagnoses and treatment decisions, but do not adequately account for participants’ lives. Studies of marginalia enable qualitatively derived insights to be effectively incorporated into survey methodology, enabling us to better attend to the ways participants communicate and share their lives with us over the course of any study. Keywords: women’s health, cancer, sexual function, structured questionnaires, FSFI When taking a survey, have you ever wanted to leave a comment on the side of the page? Perhaps the question was worded vaguely or the response options did not capture your experi- ence. Maybe you left a note, drew a line on the page, or skipped the question altogether. If you had decided to leave a comment in the margin, there are few options for a survey researcher; this means the researcher likely ignored the note or it may have gotten lost in the quantification of the survey data. In the current study, we took a different stance on this issue. Rather than ignoring these marginalia, we considered par- ticipants’ comments an essential form of data. We describe a qualitative analysis of the notes, underlines, and cross-outs left by participants in the margins of a paper-and-pencil survey. We argue that this methodological decision is cru- cial to developing research methods that can attend to the ways that participants’ lives might otherwise get lost or obscured (i.e., pushed to the margins) during the research process. As part of a multimethod study about wom- en’s sexual health and cancer (McClelland, 2015; McClelland, Holland, & Griggs, 2015a, 2015b), we asked participants to answer several self-report scales about their sexual well-being. One of these scales was the Female Sexual Function Index (FSFI; Rosen et al., 2000), often considered the gold standard scale in research Editor’s Note. David Frost served as the action editor for this article.—RJ Sara I. McClelland and Kathryn J. Holland, Departments of Psychology and Women’s Studies, University of Michi- gan, Ann Arbor. This work was supported by the Comprehensive Cancer Center, Cancer Research Committee, University of Michi- gan and the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, University of Michigan. We thank Harley Dutcher for her help preparing this article and our sincerest thanks to the participants who volunteered their time and energy. Correspondence concerning this article should be ad- dressed to Sara I. McClelland, University of Michigan, 204 South State Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48109. E-mail: saramcc@umich.edu This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly. Qualitative Psychology © 2016 American Psychological Association 2016, Vol. 3, No. 1, 000 2326-3601/16/$12.00 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/qup0000056 1