Validity of self-report techniques questions interviews and psychological tests

Question 1

What is a psychological test

Answer 1

psychological test is a set of tests that measure some aspect of human behaviour

Question 2

Name five types of psychological tests

Answer 2

IQ, personality, new scales, attitude scales, aptitude scales

Question 3

When assessing the validity what are the 4 main considerations?

Answer 3

Social desirability bias, interviewer bias, leading questions, and content validity

Question 4

What is social desirability bias

Answer 4

The participant may behave in the most socially acceptable way for the purposes of the research study

Question 5

Is social desirability bias a participant effect or not?

Answer 5

Yes it is

Question 6

What effect can and interviewer bias have and how

Answer 6

The interviewers Behaviour may affect or bias the answers. e.g. they may subtly and unconsciously tilt his head for example to encourage the correct answer to a test item when doing a face-to-face interview

Question 7

What is the problem with leading questions?

Answer 7

If the question contains a suggestion that the expected answer than the answers provided wouldn’t truly represent the participants thoughts and feelings

Question 8

What will be the impact on the validity of the data if the questions are ambiguous?

Answer 8

The validity of the data will be lowered

Question 9

What is content validity

Answer 9

Has the researcher measured what he intended to measure

Question 10

If the questionnaire or interview or test is not measuring the intended quantity tent then any score or data will be meaningless and the measure will be classed as lacking what?

Answer 10

Content validity

Question 11

What is the ceiling effect

Answer 11

If all the questions on a test are easy then everyone will do well i.e. hit the ceiling

Question 12

What is the floor effect

Answer 12

If all the questions are too hard everyone will do poorly and hit the floor

Question 13

What are the five ways of assessing the validity

Answer 13

Lie scale, face validity, concurrent validity, predictive validity and construct validity

Question 14

What is a lie scale?

Answer 14

A lie scale is a way to assess whether people are telling the truth so a few questions act as truth detectors. If the answer to those questions are unnaturally positive then the live scale may have a high result and cause you to be sceptical about the answers on the rest of the questionnaire

Question 15

Give an example of a truth detector?

Answer 15

Are you always happy? Are you always positive?

Question 16

What is face validity?

Answer 16

Base solidity concerns the issue of whether a self-report measure looks like it is measuring what the researcher intended to measure.

Question 17

What is concurrent validity

Answer 17

What is concurrent validity? This can be established by comparing performance on a new self-report measure with a previously validated one on the same topic - if the new measure produces a similar outcome as the older one then this demonstrates the concurrent validity of the new measure

Question 18

What is predictive validity

Answer 18

Their score would predict success on other related measures e.g. an intelligence test. Therefore we can check this out as a means of assessing the predictive validity of a measurement

Question 19

What is construct validity

Answer 19

This is assessed by looking at the underlying constructs of a test. For example a questionnaire on aggression would need to reflect various key theoretical views in order to be valid

Question 20

How do you improve the validity

Answer 20

The test would need to be revised to produce a better match between scores on the new test and an established one