Investigated the reliability and validity of the Student Activities Interest Questionnaire, developed to relate student interests to available campus activities using Holland's (1997) vocational interest categories. Found the instrument to be sufficiently reliable and valid for use as an informal means of prioritizing campus activities. (EV)

A study examined reliability and validity of the Test of Playfulness (ToP) with 25 children who have physical disabilities but no cognitive limitations, comparing their scores with those of able-bodied peers and examining patterns of difference in test items between groups. The mean ToP scores of the two groups did not differ. (Contains 33…

Confirmatory factor analysis results for the Attitudes toward Diversity Scale (ATDS) using 349 adults from different occupations indicated that the ATDS is 3-dimensional as hypothesized. Results support its high internal consistency and that it is not affected by a social desirability response style. (SLD)

Employs factor analysis and comparability analysis to investigate the impact of item order on the number of factors and the underlying factor structure stability of the writing apprehension construct of the 1975 Daly and Miller scale. Finds that the randomized item factor structure was comparable with the original item order factor structure. (SR)

Conducted a measurement study to validate a preliminary survey for dental students which contained five subscales: computer use, information resource use, computer knowledge, capabilities of computer systems, and effects of computers on dental practice. Found that all survey scales except computer use were unidimensional; computer use required a…

A method for estimation of reliability for multiple-component measuring instruments with clustered data is outlined. The approach is applicable with hierarchical designs where individuals are nested within higher order units and exhibit possibly related performance on components of a scale of interest. The procedure is developed within the…

Anxiety is one of the most pervasive symptoms seen in clinical psychological disorders. The Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI) is a popular measure to assess the construct of anxiety. This study was concerned with an examination of potential study factors that are associated with the variability of the reliability estimates of the BAI scores. A review…

In an attempt to gain a fuller understanding of the basis of grading, ten assessors each assessed two portfolios drawn from the course archive which had been produced by participants on a course in teaching in higher education. Assessors gave a grade or judgement on each of a portfolio's 75 portfolio elements, reasons for each judgement they made,…

The concern behind my question, "Can there be validity without reliability?" (Moss, 1994), was about the influence of measurement practices on the quality of education. I argued that conventional operationalizations of reliability in the measurement literature, which I summarized as "consistency, quantitatively defined, among independent…

Interest development is not an easily studied process. There are at least 4 methods for examining the process of stability and change over time: relative stability, absolute stability, profile stability, and structural stability. A program of research that focuses on examining these 4 types of stability is summarized relative to the issues…

In this study, we investigated a new instrument: the Southampton Test of Empathy for Preschoolers (STEP). The test incorporated 8 video vignettes of children in emotional scenarios, assessing a child's ability to understand (STEP-UND) and share (STEP-SHA) in the emotional experience of a story protagonist. Each vignette included 4 emotions (angry,…

Two studies are reported presenting the development of the Adolescent Friendship Attachment Scale (AFAS), a 30 item self-report measure of adolescent close friendship conceptualized as an attachment relationship. Study One reports the results of exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses with a sample of 490 adolescents aged 13 to 19 years. A…

Background: In Australia, diagnosis and management of depression in adults with intellectual disability (ID) often occurs within the primary care setting. Few tools are available to assist general practitioners (GPs) in the diagnostic process. The study aim was to assess properties of carer and GP checklists developed to address this problem.…

This article attempts to present a novel application of a method of measuring accuracy for academic success predictors that could be used as a standard. This procedure is known as the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve, which comes from statistical decision techniques. The statistical prediction techniques provide predictor models and…

The Adult Trait Hope Scale (Snyder et al., 1991) typically has been administered to samples of college students, and previous researchers have not explored key demographic variables. In a large sample of community persons who were not in college (N = 215), significant differences were detected in Hope Scale scores across differing age groups and…