Validity & Reliability of a

Study design

A Presentation
VALIDITY AND RELIABILITY IN
RESEARCH FINDINGS

 Validity means that the conclusions

are true.
 Reliability means that someone else
using the same method in the same
circumstances should be able to
obtain the same findings.
Confounding factors

 Unexpected factors beyond your

control might have produced the
same effect as the intervention you
were studying, thereby making it
impossible for you to know whether
it was your intervention that
produced the impact.
Differential subject loss In
various groups

 The type of subjects who drop out of

your study or control groups may be
related to some of the characteristics
you are studying.
 Selectivity (or bias) In assigning
subjects to various groups
Instrumentation

 Instrument reactivity: the instrument

itself has an effect on the subjects and
produces a distorted response.
Example
 In a survey on alcoholism, you ask school

children –“Is your father an alcoholic?"

Unreliability of instruments

 You want to determine the age of

children in your study. You ask the
mother or any child in the house,
"How old is this child"?"
 Your weighing scale is not adjusted to
zero level.
Hawthorne effect

 If a group is being observed to

determine the effect of an intervention,
the observed change may be due to the
fact that the group is being studied
rather than due to the intervention.
Strategies to deal with
threats to validity

 Control group. Observing a

control group who are not exposed to
the risk factor or intervention reduces
threats due to history and Hawthorne
effects and confounding factors.
Random assignment of
subjects

 to the group. This reduces threat to

selectivity.
Before & after measurements.
 This allows us to assess whether there
has been selectivity as well as differential
loss of subjects.
 If there has been inevitable loss of
subjects, it may enable assessment of the
dropouts to determine whether they had
peculiar characteristics that distinguished
them from those who did not drop out.
Unobtrusive methods of
data collection
 and allowing adaptation time for
subjects to get used to being
observed serve to reduce Hawthorne
effects.
Careful design and
pretesting of instruments
 reduce bias due to Instrumentation.
Knowledge of environment
& events
 enables the researcher to be sensitive
to external events that could affect
validity (i.e., history).