Practice question · True or false
A measure can be highly reliable and still fail completely as a measure of the concept it names.
Hints
- Ask what a scale that is consistently three kilograms heavy tells you.
- Consistency and correctness are separate properties.
Show the answer
True
Why
True, and this is the more common failure in sociology. Repeating a badly worded question gives the same distorted answer every time, which looks like a well-behaved instrument. Reliability is easy to demonstrate and validity is hard, so published measures skew towards the first.
Practise Analysing Social Processes
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