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Psychometrics is the construction and validation of measurement instruments and assessing if these instruments are reliable and valid forms of measurement. In behavioral medicine, psychometrics is usually concerned with measuring individual’s knowledge, ability, personality, and types of behaviors. Measurement usually takes place in the form of a questionnaire, and questionnaires must be evaluated extensively before being able to state that they have excellent psychometric properties, meaning a scale is both reliable and valid.
Description
A reliable scale consistently measures the same construct. This can occur across testing sessions, individuals, and settings. A valid measure measures what it says it is going to measure. If something is valid, it is always reliable. However, something can be reliable without being valid.
For example (see Fig. 1), if someone has five darts and is told to hit the bull’s eye every time, their ideal aim is to be both...
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References and Readings
DeVellis, R. F. (2003). Scale development: Theory and applications (2nd ed.). London: Sage.
Grimm, G. L., & Yarnold, P. R. (2000). Reading and understanding more multivariate statistics. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
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© 2013 Springer Science+Business Media, New York
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Ginty, A.T. (2013). Psychometric Properties. In: Gellman, M.D., Turner, J.R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Behavioral Medicine. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-1005-9_480
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-1005-9_480
Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-1-4419-1004-2
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