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Practical Strategies for Psychological Measurement

18 November, 2015 - 17:39

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

  1. Specify the four broad steps in the measurement process.
  2. Explain how you would decide whether to use an existing measure or create your own.
  3. Describe multiple strategies to identify and locate existing measures of psychological constructs.
  4. Describe several general principles for creating new measures and for implementing existing and new measures.
  5. Create a simple plan for assessing the reliability and validity of an existing or new measure.

So far in this chapter, we have considered several basic ideas about the nature of psychological constructs and their measurement. But now imagine that you are in the position of actually having to measure a psychological construct for a research project. How should you proceed? Broadly speaking, there are four steps in the measurement process: (a) conceptually defining the construct, (b) operationally defining the construct, (c) implementing the measure, and (d) evaluating the measure. In this section, we will look at each of these steps in turn.