The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 MMPI-2 measures many personality characteristics and disorders by having people decide whether each of over different statements applies to them—where many of the statements do not have any obvious relationship to the construct that they measure.
For example, if a researcher conceptually defines test anxiety as involving both sympathetic nervous system activation leading to nervous feelings and negative thoughts, then his measure of test anxiety should include items about both nervous feelings and negative thoughts. Or consider that attitudes are usually defined as involving thoughts, feelings, and actions toward something. By this conceptual definition, a person has a positive attitude toward exercise to the extent that he or she thinks positive thoughts about exercising, feels good about exercising, and actually exercises.
Like face validity, content validity is not usually assessed quantitatively. Instead, it is assessed by carefully checking the measurement method against the conceptual definition of the construct. But if it were found that people scored equally well on the exam regardless of their test anxiety scores, then this would cast doubt on the validity of the measure.
A criterion can be any variable that one has reason to think should be correlated with the construct being measured, and there will usually be many of them. For example, one would expect test anxiety scores to be negatively correlated with exam performance and course grades and positively correlated with general anxiety and with blood pressure during an exam. Or imagine that a researcher develops a new measure of physical risk taking.
Criteria can also include other measures of the same construct. For example, one would expect new measures of test anxiety or physical risk taking to be positively correlated with existing established measures of the same constructs. This is known as convergent validity. Assessing convergent validity requires collecting data using the measure. Discriminant validity , on the other hand, is the extent to which scores on a measure are not correlated with measures of variables that are conceptually distinct.
For example, self-esteem is a general attitude toward the self that is fairly stable over time. It is not the same as mood, which is how good or bad one happens to be feeling right now. If the new measure of self-esteem were highly correlated with a measure of mood, it could be argued that the new measure is not really measuring self-esteem; it is measuring mood instead. All these low correlations provide evidence that the measure is reflecting a conceptually distinct construct. Chiang, Dana C.
Skip to content 4. Define validity, including the different types and how they are assessed. Describe the kinds of evidence that would be relevant to assessing the reliability and validity of a particular measure.
Key Takeaways Psychological researchers do not simply assume that their measures work. Instead, they conduct research to show that they work. If they cannot show that they work, they stop using them. There are two distinct criteria by which researchers evaluate their measures: reliability and validity.
Reliability is consistency across time test-retest reliability , across items internal consistency , and across researchers interrater reliability.
Validity is the extent to which the scores actually represent the variable they are intended to. Validity is a judgment based on various types of evidence. The reliability and validity of a measure is not established by any single study but by the pattern of results across multiple studies. The assessment of reliability and validity is an ongoing process. A study is considered to have construct validity if the researcher can demonstrate that the variables of interest were properly operationalized.
As a researcher, it is important to keep the concept of validity in mind at all times when designing a study. A good researcher will discuss the project design with an advisor or a group of colleagues to help ensure that validity is preserved at every stage of the process. A research project that lacks validity may draw conclusions that are inappropriate or even dangerous if applied to the target population. For more information about how to ensure the validity of research, please review Research Validity.
Wadsworth Publishing February 27, All Rights Reserved Worldwide. Privacy Policy Information Disclaimer. Unite For Sight. Generate your APA citations for free! APA Citation Generator. Home Knowledge Base Methodology The four types of validity. The four types of validity Published on September 6, by Fiona Middleton.
Content validity : Is the test fully representative of what it aims to measure? Face validity : Does the content of the test appear to be suitable to its aims?
Criterion validity : Do the results accurately measure the concrete outcome they are designed to measure? Example A mathematics teacher develops an end-of-semester algebra test for her class.
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Other students also liked. Reliability vs validity: what's the difference? Reliability is about a method's consistency, and validity is about its accuracy. You can assess both using various types of evidence. Types of reliability and how to measure them Reliability measures the consistency of results over time; between observers; between versions of a test; and between items of a test.
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