Reliability and Validity Paper

Reliability and Validity Paper

Elyse Chagollia

5/26/2013

Jason Cantrone/BSHS 382

Reliability and Validity Paper

In the Human Service profession there can be many different interpretations of information and data; this makes things very complex. While one person will evaluate a client a certain way, another might not. It is subjective in some ways. Human services would definitely have something to gain from using techniques such as data collection and evaluation techniques. There is a need for accurate data collection so that the evaluations can be as spot on as they possibly could.

Reliability and Validity are something used in most, if not all, research. Validity confirms how well the measure does what it was supposed to do, or completes its purpose. Usually the things being measured is a tool of some sort, or can be used as a tool. And when I say tool, I don’t mean a hammer out of the toolbox! In research, a tool might be a medical machine, a test, or a person evaluating. Reliability is referred to as the quality or state of being reliable; specifically: the extent to which an experiment, test, or measuring procedure yields the same result on repeated trials. Some might call this the dependability factor of research. There are quite a few types of reliability and validity. According to University of Phoenix  Beginning Behavioral Research: A Conceptual Primer (2008), these are the different types of Reliablility and Validity: 

* Alternate-form reliability: The degree of relatedness of different forms of the same test.

* Internal-consistency reliability: The overall degree of relatedness of all items in a test or all raters in a judgment study (also called reliability of components).

* Item-to-item reliability: The reliability of any single item on average (analogous to judge-to-judge reliability, which is the reliability of any single judge on average).

* Test-retest reliability: The degree of temporal stability...