GLOSSARY OF TERMS
The instrument reviews on this website contain the following information:
Method of Administration: Indicates how each instrument can be administered. Some are designed to be administered individually, in a one-on-one testing situation, while others are designed for group settings, such as a classroom. Finally, some are designed for both individual and group testing situations.
Source of Information: Specifies whom the instrument respondent(s) is/are, either self, parent, teacher, peer, therapist, law enforcement officer, and/or observer.
Type of Scale: Indicates style of items contained in instrument.
| Forced choice: | Inventory item arranged as a dyad (two options), a triad (three options), or a tetrad (four options) of terms or phrases. The respondent is required to select an option viewed as most descriptive of the personality, interests, or behavior of the person being evaluated. |
| Likert: | An attitude scale consisting of a series of statements with five response categories: Strongly Agree, Agree, Undecided, Disagree, Strongly Disagree. |
| Open response: | A question in which the respondent's answer is not fixed or limited in any way; he or she is free to make any short-answer or essay response. |
| Multiple response option: | A question consisting of a stem and several response options. |
Norms: A list of scores and the corresponding percentile ranks, standard scores, or other transformed scores of a group of individuals on whom a psychometric instrument has been standardized.
Psychometrics: Theory and research pertaining to the measurement of psychological (cognitive and affective) characteristics.
Reliability: The extent to which a psychological assessment device measures anything consistently. A reliable instrument is relatively free from errors of measurement, so respondents' obtained scores are close in numerical value to their true scores.
Test-Retest Reliability: A method of assessing the reliability of a psychometric instrument by administering it to the same group of people on two different occasions and computing the correlations between the scores obtained on the two occasions.
Inter-rater Reliability: Inter-rater reliability is the extent to which two or more individuals (coders or raters) agree. Inter-rater reliability addresses the consistency of the implementation of a rating system for an instrument.
Internal Consistency: The extent to which all questions or items on a psychometric instrument measure the same variable or construct.
Validity: The extent to which an assessment instrument measures what it was designed to measure. Validity can be assessed in several ways: by analysis of the instrument's content (content validity), by relating scores on a psychometric instrument to a criterion measure (predictive and concurrent validity), and by a more thorough study of the extent to which the instrument is a measure of a certain psychological construct (construct validity).
Scoring Procedure: Indicates how responses are scored, either manually (by hand), via a computer-scoring program, or both.
REFERENCES
Aiken, Lewis R. (1997). Questionnaires and Inventories: Surveying Opinions and Assessing Personality. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Anastasi, Anne. (1976). Psychological Testing (4th ed.) New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc.