Exam 5: Identifying Good Measurement

RESEARCH STUDY 5.4: Dr.Li is interested in creating a measurement of religiosity.According to the dictionary, religiosity is "the quality of being religious; piety; devoutness." He creates a measure comprising 10 statements.People respond to each statement using the following scale (1 = strongly disagree, 3 = neither agree nor disagree, 5 = strongly agree).Some of the statements are below. Statement 1: "I believe in a religion." Statement 2: "Part of who I am stems from my religious beliefs." Statement 3: "I believe that religion is unnecessary." Dr.Li gives his new measure to a group of 100 adults in order to test the internal validity of his measure.What type of correlation coefficients (r) would Dr.Li expect to find between Statements 1 and 2 and between Statements 1 and 3? What would these correlation coefficients tell Dr.Li about the internal reliability of his measure?

In looking at a scatterplot of interrater reliability, why would a researcher want to see all the dots close to the line of agreement?

For her research methods class, Serena plans to interview several teachers about their attitude toward teaching children who have attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).This is an example of what type of measurement?

What does it mean that "reliability is necessary but not sufficient for validity"?

Dr.Sarolli is planning on measuring literacy (defined as the ability to read and write written text in one's native language).He decides he wants to create a quantitative operational definition.Create an ordinal, interval, and ratio way to measure literacy.

Todd is studying the effect of popularity on academic success for his research methods project.He decides to measure popularity by asking each elementary school student to tell him how many friends he or she has.He assumes that more friends means the student is more popular.Which of the following best describes this variable?

A helpful tool for visualizing test-retest reliability and interrater reliability is a:

RESEARCH STUDY 5.4: Dr.Li is interested in creating a measurement of religiosity.According to the dictionary, religiosity is "the quality of being religious; piety; devoutness." He creates a measure comprising 10 statements.People respond to each statement using the following scale (1 = strongly disagree, 3 = neither agree nor disagree, 5 = strongly agree).Some of the statements are below. Statement 1: "I believe in a religion." Statement 2: "Part of who I am stems from my religious beliefs." Statement 3: "I believe that religion is unnecessary." Name two types of reliability that apply to Dr.Li's measure and how each one could be established, given the above scenario.

In which of the following ways are content and face validity similar?

RESEARCH STUDY 5.1: Dr.Rodriquez is considering conducting a study examining whether narcissistic people have poorer romantic relationships than those who are not narcissistic.One of her first tasks is to determine which of her participants are narcissistic and which are not.She decides to use the scale created by a colleague, the Donal scale.Question 1 reads, "I tend not to think about other people as much as I think about myself." Question 2 reads, "I do not have a high opinion of myself." Question 3 reads, "I think other people think I am really special." Before using the measure in her study, Dr.Rodriquez gives the measure to a group of participants on the first day of the semester and again on the last day of the semester.She then compares the scores between the two time points.This is a test of which of the following?

RESEARCH STUDY 5.2: Dr.Sheffield is a clinical psychologist who specializes in treating pathological gambling.Pathological gambling is defined as being unable to resist impulses to gamble.Bothered by not having a good measure that he can give to clients to determine whether they are suffering from this condition, he creates a new measure of pathological gambling.The measure has 15 questions, and it takes 20 minutes to complete. To test his measure, Dr.Sheffield gives his measure to a group of his clients and at the same time measures how many times they have been gambling in the past month.He predicts that clients who score higher on his measure will also report gambling more times in the past month.This procedure is meant to provide evidence for which of the following?

Another word for discriminant validity is validity.

Asking an expert or experts to evaluate a measure is used to establish validity.

Which of the following is NOT an example of physiological measurement?

When using correlation coefficients to evaluate reliability, which of the following is undesirable?

For his research methods class, Felipe plans to watch how students treat other children in their classrooms who have attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).He will evaluate how positively or negatively the children are treated by their classmates.This is an example of what type of measurement?

What is the difference between a ratio scale of measurement and an interval scale of measurement?

Which of the following is NOT possible?

Name the three types of internal reliability and the four types of validity.

RESEARCH STUDY 5.2: Dr.Sheffield is a clinical psychologist who specializes in treating pathological gambling.Pathological gambling is defined as being unable to resist impulses to gamble.Bothered by not having a good measure that he can give to clients to determine whether they are suffering from this condition, he creates a new measure of pathological gambling.The measure has 15 questions, and it takes 20 minutes to complete. Dr.Sheffield has now decided that he wants to test his measure on some university students (who some estimates say have a 6% prevalence rate of compulsive gambling).He has a group of 100 university students complete his measure.He also has them complete two other measures (one that measures addictive behavior in general and one that measures general attitudes toward gambling).He finds that his new measure is positively associated with each of these other measures.This procedure has provided evidence for the of Dr.Sheffield's measure.