Lecture about Construct Validity and Reliability

Video Introducing Construct Validity and Reliability
- video
- Lecture Slides
- questions and answers
Video about Construct Validity and Reliability using the Video Game Violence Article as an example
- video
- Lecture Slides
- questions and answers

Identifying Types of Validity and Reliability Assignment

The goal of this assignment is to practice identifying the types of validity and reliability using quotes from real world assessments- Myers-Briggs, the Beck Depression Inventory, and the Need for Cognitive Closure Inventory.

word document or see TopHat
Answer Key
Class Recording

Activity Info

Objectives and What Students Should Be Able To Do After This Activity
- Given a quote from a text, identify the specific type of construct validity or reliability that it is referring to
Prerequisite Knowledge
- Very Little
What Students Struggle with
- Students think that this is easier than it is for them
- They often get confused between:
  - internal reliability vs. internal validity
  - convergent vs. discriminant (a correlation between two instruments that are theoretically supposed to be correlated is evidence for convergent validity, but a correlation between two instruments that are theoretically supposed to not be correlated is evidence for poor discriminant validity)
  - criterion vs. convergent - students often have difficulty assessing what an 'important real-world outcome' is, and sometimes think that other scales are real-world outcomes, in which case they confuse criterion validity vs. convergent validity. In actuality there are borderline cases when a survey is supposed to measure an important outcome, and sometimes the best way to measure important real-world outcomes are just with a scale. It can also be confusing if there is a correlation between a scale and another single item scale, because a single item can feel like a single real-world outcome.
  - criterion vs. content validity - students have difficulty with content validity, and forget to ask themselves if it is an objective / empirical analysis or subjective
  - face validity is hard to define and hard for students