Chapter 6

Sherry is interested in measuring a concept that she calls “meanness.” She has found scales that measure aggression, lack of respect for others, and self-centeredness. If these three concepts strongly correlate with her newly created Meanness Inventory, then Sherry will have demonstrated:

• Discriminant

• Concurrent

• Predictive

• Test-Retest

Imagine you have designed a new scale to measure the competence of social workers. If you administered the scale on October 1 and again of March 1 to the same group of people, then you would be attempting to show:

• External Validity

• Test-Retest Reliability

• Internal Validity

• Alternate Forms of Reliability

When individual items in a scale correlate well with the full scale, the scale is said to have:

• Internal Reliability

• Content Validity

• Internal Consistency

• Correlational Validity

James is working with a group of high schoolers who are at risk for dropping out. With the scale he has created, he wants to determine which students are mostly likely to drop out. If his scale is good enough to identify these students’ future status in school, it could be said to have:

• predictive validity

• test-retest reliability

• convergent validity

• face validity

The textbook recommends that you should always try to create your own instrument first before deciding upon one or two that you find on the Internet.

• True

• False

Ashley is working at VA and has created a scale where soldiers with PTSD have significantly higher scores than soldiers and a group of civilians who do not have PTSD.  In the report she is writing, she identifies her instrument’s trait as content validity.  Is she correct?

• Yes

• No

Internal consistency is a way of evaluating research instruments in terms of their:

• Interaction effects

• Double-blind procedure

• Reliability

• Validity

Lexus and Darci are both rating disruptions in Mrs. Washington’s third grade class.  What would the term be called if they were to try to compute what percent of time they were in agreement?

• inter-rater reliability

• face validity

• convergent validity

• test-retest reliability

The reliability coefficients of a scale indicating that it was acceptable to be used in an exploratory study or the beginning stages of a study should be at least:

• 0.90

• 1.0

• 0.80

• 0.70