Reliability and Valisity in Human Services

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Reliability and Validity in Human Services Rebecca Lunn BSHS/382 4-10-14 Angela Colistra Reliability and Validity in Human Services There are several types of reliability and validity in research. Let’s start with some types of reliability and examples. There are four general types of reliability, there are inter-rater or inter- observer, test reliability, parallel-forms, internal consistency. First let us look at inter rater or inter observer reliability, this is used to assess the degree that different raters/observers give consistent estimates of the same phenomenon. There are two major ways to estimate inter-rater reliability. If your measurement consists of categories the raters would check off which category each human observation fall in, this helps you to calculate the percent of agreement between the raters. The other major way is to estimate when the measure is a continuous one. All you need to do this is calculate the correlation between the ratings of the two observers. The next type of reliability is test reliability. We estimate test retest when we administer the same test to the same people but on different occasions. We assume that there are no major changes in the people being tested from the first to the next test. The amount of time that seperates each test, the shorter time gap the higher the correlation, the longer the time gap the lower the correlation. Since this correlation is the test retest you can obtain considerable different estimates depending on the time gap. The next is parallel form you first have to create two parallel forms. One way to accomplish this is to create large sets of questions which address the same subject and then randomly divide the questions into two sets. You give both sets of questions to the same people. The correlation between the two parallel forms is the estimate of reliability. The one major problem
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