Scales and Measures in Research

By

Dr. Anamika RayAssistant Professor in Mass Communication

Gauhati University, Assam, India

THURSTONE SCALE

• Developed by L.L. Thurston.

• To measure direction and intensity or salience.

• Often used in psychology and education research.

GUTTMAN SCALE

• Developed by Louis Guttmann in 1950.

• To measure intensity or commitment to an opinion, cause,

person, organization or course of action in a hierarchical way.

FEELING THERMOMETERS

• Mainly used in political planning and research.

• Subjects more often than not find it preferable to

communicate to the thermometer and pick a number, but they

avoid very high and low ones.

RANKING SCALES

• A mean for comparing two or more reference on one or more

quality.

• Subjects are presented with a list and told to put items on it.

COMPOSITE MEASURES

• Simplifying data analysis by reducing the number of variables

relevant in a research work.

QUALITY CONTROL

• One of the quickest way of research.

• Involvement of the examination of both questions and

response options to make sure they are unbiased.

RELIABILITY

• Stable and dependable measure.

• Many times use helps to get similar result.

• Accuracy is easy to achieve.

Concurrent Reliability: The reliability of a measure is

most often assessed by checking the strength and statistical

significance of its correlation with some other measure.

Alternate Forms Reliability: It is a variant of the basic

correlation technique.

TYPES OF RELIABILITY

Split Half Reliability: Here the subjects are divided into two

groups then compares the scores on a measure for one group to

those for the other.

Test Retest Reliability: Here, we administer the same test to the

same subjects at two different times.

Crouchback's Alpha (Co-efficient Alpha): It is used

exclusively to check the reliability of a composite measures. It

can be laborious task with large sample.

Intra And Inter Coder Reliability: The easiest way to

determine whether a single observer is reliable to perform an

inter coder reliability check

VALIDITY

Validity depicts the concept of reliability, external validity-the ability to generalize presumes internal validity.

• Content validity: It is a simplest form of research. It is reasonable one. It appears to be measuring what is intended to measure.

• Criterion Validity: using this method, concurrent validity can be established by finding a statistically significant, positive co relation between the measure or test in question for which validity has previously been put.

• Predictive Validity: It can access whether scores on the test

are positively related to success of the college.

• Construct Validity: It is commonly used in academic

research. The common way to establish construct validity is

to test the measure in question against two other measures

known from previous work which are valid.

Thank you