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Week 8 Assignment: Create a Scale Construction Proposal

Activity Description

For this task, complete the readings for this assignment, and then write a paper in which you complete the following:

1. Write an introduction that examines the construct, its conceptual definition/s, and related concepts.
2. Review the literature and the existing tools that measure the construct.
3. Provide justification for your original scale.
4. Discuss how you intend to construct the items, cognizant of the basic principles of item pool construction, the necessity of SMEs, the unidimensionality or multidimensionality of the construct, etc.
5. Write at least 20 sample items that represent the construct you are planning to measure. You may construct negatively-worded items, but indicate these in a chart or table. If the construct you choose has two or more dimensions under it, write sample items indicating which items fall under which dimension. (See for example, the Life Position Scale that contained four dimensions I’m OK etc. at first, but after factor analysis the dimensions reduced to two—I and You.)
6. Argue for a specific method of running an item analysis procedure.
7. Argue for at least two specific methods of establishing your scale’s validity (Choose at least one method for construct validity, and another method for criterion-related validity. In criterion validation, it is not enough to simply write that you are planning to employ the method. Be sure to specify the variable(s) you will correlate your scale with.

Length: 10 pages

Your assignment should demonstrate thoughtful consideration of the ideas and concepts presented in the course by providing new thoughts and insights relating directly to this topic. Your response should reflect scholarly writing and current APA standards.

Learning Outcomes

3.0   Select methods used in the creation of items that measure psychological constructs.

4.0   Appraise different approaches to establishing item and instrument reliability.

5.0   Evaluate the different approaches to instrument validation.

6.0   Discriminate methods of establishing criterion or predictive validity.

Introduction: 

Your proposal is similar to a research proposal that expresses intent to perform a scientific investigation. However, unlike a research proposal that first establishes the existence of a gap in the knowledge and proceeds to argue for a relationship between or among variables, the scale construction proposal is just a scaled-down manuscript that discusses your intention to construct a psychological scale.

Nevertheless, it should contain an introduction that discusses the construct of interest and a review of the existing tools created to measure it. It should also be ideal to explain why you intend to construct an original scale that measures your chosen construct or why the existing tools do not satisfy the purpose of your dissertation. What follows this should include specific methods that you will employ to construct the items, to weed out bad items and retain good ones, to establish item reliability and consistency, and a proposal to establish the scale’s validity. In establishing validity, you must be specific in the methods that you will employ and the variables that you will correlate with your chosen construct. Also, be specific in the variables that you expect to correlate highly with your construct and those that should yield weak correlations with it (as what you will expect in a Multi-trait, Multi-method matrix, page 287 in Kline).