Discuss the importance of reliability and validity in the scientific method with examples.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Answers will vary. Sociologists are always concerned about reliability and validity. Reliability is the consistency with which the same measure produces similar results time after time. If, for example, a person asks "How old are you?" on two subsequent days and a respondent gives two different answers, such as 25 and 30, there's either something wrong with the question or the respondent is lying. Respondents might lie, but scientists must make sure that their measures are as reliable as possible.Validity is the degree to which a measure is accurate and really measures what it claims to measure. Consider student course evaluations. The measures of a "good" professor often include items such as "The instructor is interesting" and "The instructor is fair."We do not know how accurate such measures are in differentiating between "good" and "bad" professors because it is difficult to understand what students mean by "interesting" and "fair." A study at two large public universities found that a third of the students admitted being dishonest in end-of-semester course evaluations. Some fibbed to make their instructors look good, but most lied to "punish" professors they did not like, especially when they received lower grades than they thought they deserved (Clayson and Haley, 2011). Such research findings raise questions about the accuracy and usefulness of student course evaluations in measuring an instructor's actual performance.