Several of Kay’s friends have completed a short quiz titled “How Friendly Are You . . . Really?” on a popular social media platform. Although Kay knows the quiz is intended for entertainment value only, she is curious as to how sound it really it is. Suggest two ways that Kay might establish the quiz’s reliability and two ways that she might establish its validity. Make explicit reference to the types of reliability and types of validity described in the textbook.

What will be an ideal response?


Ans: Reliability refers to the consistency with which an instrument assesses a construct. Kay might assess the quiz’s test–retest reliability by having a sample of participants take the quiz twice, with a week or two intervening between each completion. If the quiz has good test–retest reliability, an individual should receive very similar scores on the two attempts. Kay might also examine the quiz’s internal reliability—the questions should generally seem to relate to each other. With respect to validity, Kay could establish the concurrent validity of the quiz by finding a positive correlation between friendliness scores on the quiz and other plausible measures of friendliness—people with higher scores on the quiz should have more Facebook friends, for instance. Kay can check the quiz’s content validity by ensuring that the questions cover different aspects of friendship—a quiz that focused only on, say,

Psychology

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