Exam 5: Identifying Good Measurement

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.

Lauren, Sarah, and Jennifer are students in Dr. Shaffer's Research Methods class. For a class assignment, they are asked to devise an operational definition for romantic attachment, or love. Lauren decides to ask a group of married couples to report if they are in love with their spouse (1 indicates "Yes, I am in love" and 2 indicates "No, I am not in love"). Sarah decides to watch couples sitting on campus and measure how close they sit together, assuming that people who sit closer together are more in love. Jennifer decides to recruit a group of newlyweds and measure the change in heart rate that occurs between the start of the study (when the person is alone) and the moment they see their spouse walk into the room. For each student described above, indicate whether the operational definition of her variable is self-reported, observational, or physiological.

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 gives his measure to his supervisor, who is also an expert in pathological gambling. His supervisor says that his measure appears to test all the components of pathological gambling, including feeling restless when attempting to stop gambling, jeopardizing jobs in order to keep gambling, and using gambling to escape from problems and a bad mood. Given this information, Dr. Sheffield's measure has evidence of which of the following?

Naomi is studying the effect of popularity on academic success for her research methods project. To do this, she has elementary school students rate how popular each member of their class is. She then uses this information to rank the students on popularity (e.g., John is the most popular, Vanessa is the second-most popular). Which of the following best describes this variable?

Imagine that you are trying to measure people's stress. Provide an example of measuring stress using a self-report measure, a physiological measure, and a behavioral measure.

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.

Establishing construct validity is most important for which of the following?

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 wants to establish the discriminant validity of his pathological gambling measure. He gives his measure and three others to a group of 100 people. Which of the following provides the best evidence for discriminant validity?

How many subcategories of quantitative variables exist?

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 analyzes the data she gets from her students. She looks at the relationship between each of the individual questions. She sees that participants who agree with Question 1 also agree with Question 3 and disagree with Question 2. This is a test of which of the following?

A correlation coefficient and a scatterplot both provide which of the following pieces of information?

Explain the difference between validity and reliability. Explain whether they are related or independent concepts.

Two researchers tell you they study the same thing. However, when you look at their research papers, they do not use similar methodologies or measurements. How is this possible?

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

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?

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. Draw two scatterplots: one that demonstrates the likely relationship between Statements 1 and 2 and one that demonstrates the likely relationship between Statements 1 and 3. Explain why you have drawn each scatterplot as you have.

In order to use the known groups paradigm to establish criterion validity, which of the following is necessary?

Why are convergent and discriminant validity often evaluated together?

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