Establishing validity and reliability (November 6, 2002)

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Dear Professor Mean, I need to establish validity and reliability of a new measurement. How do I do this? --- Flustered Fred

Dear Flustered. Validity and reliability are two very dangerous words to use, because they mean different things to different people. Here are some issues to consider.

Face validity

Face validity is the extent to which your measurement appears valid to the general public. Does the measurement make intuitive sense? A closely related concept is content validity, the extent to which your measurement makes intuitive sense to a group of experts in the area.

Construct validity

Construct validity is establishing that you are measuring what you think you are measuring. You do this in two very different ways. First you establish that your measure correlates well with what it should correlate well with (convergent validity) and is uncorrelated with what it should be uncorrelated with (discriminant validity).

A Plethora of Threats: A Mildly Amusing Guide for the Weary Student and Anyone Else Encountering the How To's and What If's of Construct Validity. Nicole M. Driebe. Accessed on November 4, 2002. http://trochim.human.cornell.edu/tutorial/driebe/tweb1.htm

Criterion validity

Criterion validity is the extent to which your measurement correlates with a gold standard. You can establish this two ways. First, you can see if your measure predicts a future measure that indicates the same thing (predictive validity). Second, you can see if your measure correlates well with other concurrent measures which have been established as gold standards.

Example

Two large hospitals in the Netherlands studied four risk assessment scales for pressure ulcers (BMJ 2002; 325: 797 (12 October)). Four separate scales were applied to patients without pressure ulcers who were expected to stay at least five days in the hospital. These patients were then followed for up to 12 weeks to see if a pressure ulcer did develop. They showed that all four scales had poor predictive validity--they were unable to make accurate predictions of which patients would develop pressure ulcers. The authors noted that there had been minimal evaluation of these scales beyond expert opinion and literature review.

Prospective cohort study of routine use of risk assessment scales for prediction of pressure ulcers. Lisette Schoonhoven, Jeen R E Haalboom, Mente T Bousema, Ale Algra, Diederick E Grobbee, Maria H Grypdonck, and Erik Buskens. BMJ 2002; 325: 797. [Abstract] [Abridged text] [Abridged PDF] [Full text] [PDF]

Further reading

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  8. Bulloch, B. and M. Tenenbein (2002). "Validation of 2 pain scales for use in the pediatric emergency department." Pediatrics 110(3): e33.
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  11. Carroll, R. T. The Forer effect (a.k.a. the P.T. Barnum effect and subjective validation).
  12. Carroll, R. T. The Mozart Effect. The Mozart Effect is a term coined by Alfred A. Tomatis for the alleged increase in brain development that occurs in children under age 3 when they listen to the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. skepdic.com/mozart.html
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    Excerpt: You learned in the Theory of Reliability that it's not possible to calculate reliability exactly. Instead, we have to estimate reliability, and this is always an imperfect endeavor. Here, I want to introduce the major reliability estimators and talk about their strengths and weaknesses.
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  61. The Examination Chapter of the Neurology section of the Family Practice Notebook, http://www.fpnotebook.com, has some interesting tests like the mini-mental state exam that could serve as good examples of developing validity.
  62. http://psych.athabascau.ca/html/Validity/index.shtml
  63. http://trochim.human.cornell.edu/kb/intval.htm
  64. http://trochim.human.cornell.edu/kb/contents.htm
  65. http://edf5481-01.fa01.fsu.edu/Guide4.html
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