What are the steps taken to ensure measurement validity and reliability?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Researchers can proactively take a number of steps to improve the validity and reliability of a measurement, including using established measures, ensuring confidentiality, improving the research instrument design, training the research staff, conducting a pre-test or pilot study, and validating the instrument. Efforts should be made to obtain well-established existing measures whenever possible before constructing one’s own measures. Researchers can help to ensure confidentiality by assuring anonymity where possible, establishing a rapport with subjects so that the promise of confidentiality can be trusted, replacing interviewees’ names with codes when inputting data, locking away the original instrument so that it is only accessible to core research staff, and conducting interviews in quiet, private settings.

Improving the instrument design involves avoiding asking leading, loaded, ambiguous, or too complex questions; using indirect questions when dealing with sensitive topics; and taking great care when arranging the sequence of questions and response categories. Properly training the research staff involves addressing how to conduct an interview, make observations, follow instructions, and record and input data. Close supervision is also necessary in the course of all phases of research activities. Performing a pre-test or pilot study before formally using one’s own measures helps identify words, phrases, terms, sentences, response categories, and definitions that are ambiguously worded, unknown, or irrelevant to the respondents. Revisions can be made accordingly so that the final measures are sufficiently clear, relevant, and understood. Validating instruments allows researchers to test the reliability and validity of the items included in the instrument, providing feedback for further modifications.