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The Road to Hell Is Paved With Good Intentions: How Common Practices in Scale Construction Hurt Validity.

Sound scale construction is pivotal to the measurement of psychological constructs. Common item sampling procedures emphasize aspects of reliability to the disadvantage of aspects of validity, which are less tangible. We use a health knowledge test as an example to demonstrate how item sampling stra...

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Published in:Assessment Vol. 30; no. 6; pp. 1811 - 1825
Main Authors: Steger, Diana, Jankowsky, Kristin, Schroeders, Ulrich, Wilhelm, Oliver
Format: research tables/charts Journal Article
Published: Sage Publications Inc. Sep2023
Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
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      issn: 10731911
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      dt: Sep2023
      vid: 30
      iid: 6
      pid: 344
      pub: Sage Publications Inc.
      place: Thousand Oaks, California
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        10.1177/10731911221124846
        165473055
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        atl: The Road to Hell Is Paved With Good Intentions: How Common Practices in Scale Construction Hurt Validity.
      aug:
        au:
          Steger, Diana
          Jankowsky, Kristin
          Schroeders, Ulrich
          Wilhelm, Oliver
        affil: University of Kassel, Germany
      sug:
        subj:
          Instrument Construction
          Instrument Validation
          Health Knowledge
          Scales
          Practice Patterns
          Reproducibility of Results
          Human
          Algorithms
          Insects
          Models, Theoretical
      ab: Sound scale construction is pivotal to the measurement of psychological constructs. Common item sampling procedures emphasize aspects of reliability to the disadvantage of aspects of validity, which are less tangible. We use a health knowledge test as an example to demonstrate how item sampling strategies that focus on either factor saturation or construct coverage influence scale composition and demonstrate how to find a trade-off between these two opposing needs. More specifically, we compile three 75-item health knowledge scales using Ant Colony Optimization, a metaheuristic algorithm that is inspired by the foraging behavior of ants, to optimize factor saturation, construct coverage, or a compromise of both. We demonstrate that our approach is well suited to balance out construct coverage and factor saturation when constructing a health knowledge test. Finally, we discuss conceptual problems with the modeling of declarative knowledge and provide recommendations for the assessment of health knowledge.
      pubtype: Academic Journal
      doctype:
        research
        tables/charts
        Journal Article
      ougenre: Article
    language: English
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