Exam 5: Identifying Good Measurement

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. If Dr.Sheffield's measure does not actually measure pathological gambling, his measure is said to lack which of the following?

What is the term for a researcher's definition of the variable in question at a theoretical level?

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." Given the situation above, explain the difference between criterion validity, convergent validity, and discriminant validity.Why is each one important?

Imagine that you are trying to measure people's stress.Provide three quantitative definitions of stress: one that is ordinal, one that is interval, and one that is ratio.

Establishing construct validity would probably be most important for which of the following?