Exam 6: Measurement, Validity, and Reliability

What are the two types of criterion validity?

Once a measure is determined to be reliable, it is also always found to be valid.

Sam is interested in researching the factors associated with juvenile delinquency. We think that poor school performance will be associated with increased delinquent behavior, but we are also concerned about whether delinquent peer associations might also impact delinquency levels, so we want to take that into consideration as well. In this case, peer associations are considered ______.

How can using multiple data collection methods help to test for and enhance validity and reliability. Provide at least one example of how we can do this.

A __________ is a rather vague abstract that might cause different people to conjure different meanings.

If I distributed surveys to only a group of surgeons, the question of what job they have would be considered a variable.

It is easier to code close-ended survey questions than open-ended ones.

What is the difference between mutually exclusive and exhaustive?

The extent to which our measure works well when compared to other items is called __________.

What level of measurement is a variable asking students to tell us how many college credits they have completed?

Which type of reliability becomes an issue only when we have multiple researchers working on a project together?

Adding up a number of responses to survey items gives us a(n) _________.

What level of measurement is a variable asking each competitive eater what rank he/she got in the last chicken-wing eating competition?

A _______ survey item has only one possible answer option per respondent.

The extent to which our measure is capturing the full range and meaning of the concept in question is called __________.

Having an one, and only one, answer option available per respondent on a close-ended survey question means our item is __________ .

______ is the process of defining concepts to make them measurable for research.

Robert is interested in researching the impact of drug court participation on later recidivism. In this case, drug court participation is considered the ________________.

Having an answer option available on a close-ended survey question for all possible survey respondents means our item is __________ .

In research we study how the dependent variable impacts the independent variable.