Measurement in Social and Behavioral Sciences.

Catalog description

Semester course; 3 lecture hours. 3 credits. Concurrent prerequisite: SWKD 705 or permission of instructor. This course introduces students to the importance of measurement in scientific inquiry, and will emphasize the core concepts and technical skills needed to evaluate the quality of social and behavioral measures. Students will review basic principles and procedures of measurement theory and learn practical, usable research skills through hands-on experience in developing and evaluating a measure. Students will review and discuss content on classical test and item response theories and their application to instrument development and validation. They will learn to operationalize latent variables in conceptual models and use theoretical and practical knowledge to generate items, develop and format questions, and begin to construct a scale that can be tested for reliability and validity. Students will also learn how to minimize and address threats to the utility and validity of their measure (e.g., respondent bias, measurement error). This course will examine advanced methods for testing psychometric properties of measures, including reliability statistics, confirmatory and exploratory factor analysis and IRT analysis.