Monday, January 24, 2011

Notes: Traditional Reliability Strategies

Notes: Traditional Reliability Strategies

-          Reliability and various means to estimate it.

Generic Description of the Concept of Reliability

-          Meaning of reliability

o   Precision in mental appraisal

o   Precision is determined by consistency of randomly parallel measures across several appraisals

o   How well samples of approximate assessment stimuli represent the universe of possible stimuli

o   Repeated measuring

o   Content domain – broad vs narrow   à broad – greater likelihood that sample does not hold enough breadth and depth to represent field fully.

o   Reliability is a necessary but insufficient condition for validity

o   Reliability is a measure of the absence of random error

-          Definition of reliability in CTT

o   Lord & Novick : the reliability of a test is defined as the squared correlation between the observed score and true score.

o   In practice, only have observed scores

Considerations for Reliability Assessment

-          Relaibility as integral to measurement theory

-          Reliability is more than a procedure

-          Reliability of scores, not of instruments

-          Confusing reliability with validity

o   A consistent inaccuracy is still inaccurate
-          Reliability and error as used in popular speech

-          Comments on reliability in the Standards text

-          A giant in the field of reliability appraisal

o   J Cronbach

Theory of Reliability

-          Reliability as error variance

-          Developing the index

-          Index vs coefficient

-          Estimating true score from observed score with index and coefficient

Problem of parallel measures

-          Identifying parallel measures

-          Test – retest

-          Other proximal estimates

-          Depressed calculations with shortened test length

Computing Reliability Coefficients

-          Spearman-Brown Prophecy (or Correction) Formula

Standard Error of Measurement



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