Issues in Measurement: Validity and Reliability

This short two-hour course will provide an introduction to measurement issues in the social sciences. We design questions (or "survey instruments") to gain information on the concepts we are researching. Two prime considerations in whether an instrument is effective are validity (does our instrument actually measure what we want it to measure?) and reliability (does our instrument give consistent results across a range of different situations?)

Considerations of validity and reliability are important across many areas of social science, including the measurement of personality and mental health; attitudes; ability tests; political behaviour; cultural differences and similarities between various groups; and consumer behaviour.

The course will discuss what we mean by validity and reliability, the different ways we can think about the concepts, and different ways we can assess the quality of instruments using these criteria. We will also look at some statistical techniques for reliability and validity checks: Cronbach’s Alpha, Kappa coefficient, and Factor Analysis.

None; but this module will primarily be of interest to students wishing to perform some sort of statistical analysis, so students without any background in statistics should be intending to study statistics at least until the level of BQA.

Number of sessions: 1

• Carmines, E. (1985) Reliability and validity assessment. SAGE Publications, Inc.
• Field, A. (2016). Reporting research, variables and measurement: breaking the law. In An adventure in statistics: the reality enigma (pp. 66-69). London: SAGE Publications Ltd.
• Frankfort-Nachmias, C., & Nachmias, D. (1997). Design and structure of research. In Research methods in the social sciences (fifth ed., pp. 164-174). Great Britain: Arnold.

Not assessed.

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