| Test—retest reliability | A method of assessing the reliability of a questionnaire by administering repeatedly the same or parallel form of a test.
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| Parallel-forms reliability | Establishing the reliability of a questionnaire by administering parallel (alternate) forms of the questionnaire repeatedly.
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| Split-half reliability | A method of assessing reliability of a questionnaire using a single administration of the instrument. The questionnaire is split into two parts, and responses from the two parts are correlated.
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| Accuracy | Agreement of measurement with a known standard.
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| Validity | The extent to which a measuring instrument measures what it was designed to measure.
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| Face validity | How well a test appears to measure (judging by its contents) what it was designed to measure. Example: a measure of mathematical ability would have face validity if it contained math problems.
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| Content validity | Validity of a test established by judging how adequately the test samples behavior representative of the universe of behaviors the test was designed to sample.
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| Criterion-related validity | The ability of a measure to produce results similar to those provided by other, established measures of the same variable.
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| Concurrent validity | The validity of a test established by showing that its results can be used to infer an individual’s value on some other, accepted test administered at the same time.
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| Predictive validity | The ability of a measure to predict some future behavior.
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| Construct validity | Validity that applies when a test is designed to measure a “construct” or variable “constructed” to describe or explain behavior on the basis of theory (for example, intelligence). A test has construct validity if the measured values of the construct predict behavior as expected from the theory (for example, those with higher intelligence scores achieve higher grades in school).
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| Nominal scale | A measurement scale that involves categorizing cases into two or more distinct categories. This scale yields the least information.
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| Ordinal scale | A measurement scale in which cases are ordered along some dimension (for example, large, medium, or small). The distances between scale values are unknown.
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| Interval scale | A measurement scale in which the spacing between values along the scale is known. The zero point of an interval scale is arbitrary.
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| Ratio scale | Highest scale of measurement; it has all of the characteristics of an interval scale plus an absolute zero point.
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| Range effects | A problem in which a variable being observed reaches an upper limit (ceiling effect) or lower limit (floor effect).
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| Behavioral measure | A measure of a subject’s activity in a situation; for example, the number of times a rat presses a level (frequency of responding).
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| Physiological measure | A measure of a bodily function of subjects in a study (for example, heart rate).
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| Self-report measure | A measure that requires participants to report on their past, present, or future behavior.
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| Q-sort methodology | A qualitative measurement technique that involves establishing evaluative categories and sorting items into those categories.
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| Demand characteristics | Cues inadvertently provided by the researcher or research context concerning the purposes of a study or the behavior expected from participants.
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| Role attitude cues | Unintended cues in an experiment that suggest to the participants how they are expected to behave.
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| Experimenter bias | When the behavior of the researcher influences the results of a study. Experimenter bias stems from two sources: expectancy effects and uneven treatment of subjects across treatments.
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| Expectancy effects | When a researcher’s preconceived ideas about how subjects should behave are subtly communicated to subjects and, in turn, affect the subjects’ behavior.
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| Single-blind | The person testing subjects in a study is kept unaware of the hypotheses being tested.
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| Double-blind | Neither the participants in a study nor the person carrying out the study know at the time of testing which treatment the participant is receiving.
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| Manipulation checks | Measures included in an experiment to test the effectiveness of the independent variables.
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