HRDI PRESENTATION

ANANYA MOHAPATRA

RISHIKA SINHA

SAI ADITYA RENTALA

UMANG GUPTA AGARWAL

SCALE DEVELOPMENT
Scale development is an
essential stage in the
assessment of
constructs and variables
in behavior medicine,
and in any social and
biomedical science.
Scales are used for
assessment of selfreported variables
including mood, daily
disability, various types
of symptoms,
adherence to
recommended diet, etc.

Though there is no
explicit rule for the
stages of scale
development, certain
steps need to be
included for claiming
that a scale is reliable
and valid

The reliability of a scale

is very important and
refers to its
repeatability and lack of
measurement error.
This is tested by
internal-reliability tests
(Cronbachs ) and by a
test-retest reliability of
scores over time.

Validity is an essential
aspect of a scale and
refers to the extent to
which it measures what
it claims to measure.
This is tested by several
manners including face
validity, concurrent
validity, construct
validity, and criterion
validity.

EVALUATING THE
ITEMS

After an initial pool of

items have been
developed, scrutinized,
and administered to an
appropriate sample size,
it is important to
evaluate the
performance of each
individual item

This evaluation is done

to ensure the correct
identification of the
appropriate items to
help constitute the scale

It is, in fact, the second

most important step
after Item development

Initial Examination of Items

Performance
The ultimate quality sought in an item is a high
correlation with the true score of the latent
variable.

The higher the correlations among items are, the

higher the individual item reliabilities are. The
more reliable the individual items are, the more
reliable the scale will be.

Highly intercorrelated set of scale items are

critical for a quality scale development.

REVERSE SCORING
Questionnaires that use a Likert scale (eg. strongly disagree, disagree,
neutral, agree, strongly agree) for answering questions often contain some
items which are to be reverse scored. When there are items whose
correlations with other items are negative, then reverse scoring the
negatively worded questions is done. Reverse scoring means that the
numerical scoring scale runs in the opposite direction.
For example, in a self-esteem questionnaire we may have some positively
worded questions (e.g. I take a positive attitude toward myself), but also
some negatively worded questions (e.g. At times, I think I am no good at all).
An answer of strongly disagree with a score of 1, disagree = 2, neutral =3,
agree = 4, moderately agree= 5 and strongly agree =6 is attributed for each
question. This would be fine for the positively worded questions, as this
would give people with high self-esteem a high score, however, we cant use
the same scoring for the negatively worded questions. Instead what we do is
reverse score the negatively worded questions.

1. I take a positive attitude toward

myself.
7
Strongly
Agree

6
Moderate
ly Agree

Agree

Neutral

Disagree

Moderate Strongly
ly
Disagree
Disagree

2. At times, I think I am no good at

all.
1
Strongly
Agree

Moderate
ly Agree

Agree

Neutral

Disagree

Moderate
ly
Disagree

Strongly
Disagree

ITEM-SCALE CORRELATIONS
To get a set of highly intercorrelated items, each individual item should
correlate substantially with the collection of remaining items. This property
can be examined for each item by computing its Item-Scale Correlation.
There are two types of item-scale correlation : The corrected item-scale
correlation correlates the item being evaluated with all the scale items,
excluding itself, while the uncorrected item-scale correlation correlates the
item in question with the entire set of candidate items, including itself.
It is advisable to examine the corrected item-total correlation. An item with a
high value for this correlation is more desirable than an item with a low value.

ITEM VARIANCES
Relatively High Variance is another valuable attribute for a scale item.
It is important that the scale used generates sufficient variance among
respondents for subsequent statistical analysis.

ITEM MEANS
A mean close to the center of the range of possible scores is desirable. For
example, If the response options for each item ranged from 1 ( for strongly
disagree) to 7 ( for strongly agree), an item mean near 4 would be ideal.
Items with means too near to an extreme of the response range will have
low variances, and those that vary over a narrow range will correlate poorly
with other items. A lopsided mean or a low variance for any reason will tend
to reduce an items correlation with other items.

Factor Analysis
Definition : A process in which the values of observed data are expressed as functions of a number of
possible causes in order to find which are the most important.

The key concept of factor

analysis is that multiple observed
variables have similar patterns of
responses because they are all
associated with a latent (i.e. not
directly measured) variable.

For example, people may

respond similarly to questions
about income, education, and
occupation, which are all
associated with the latent
variable socioeconomic status.

The eigenvalue is a measure of

how much of the variance of the
observed variables a factor
explains. Any factor with an
eigenvalue 1 explains more
variance than a single observed
variable.

In every factor analysis, there are

the same number of factors as
there are variables. Each factor
captures a certain amount of the
overall variance in the observed
variables, and the factors are
always listed in order of how
much variation they explain.

So if the factor for socioeconomic

status had an eigenvalue of 2.3 it
would explain as much variance
as 2.3 of the three variables.
This factor, which captures most
of the variance in those three
variables, could then be used in
other analyses.

Coefficient Alpha
One of the most important indicators of a scales quality is the reliability coefficient ,alpha . Alpha is an
indication of the proportion of variance in the scale scores that is attributable to the true score .

Theoretically alpha can take values from 0.0 to 1.0 , although it is unlikely that it will attain either
of this extreme values. If alpha is negative something is wrong . A likely problem is negative
correlations among the items. If this is the case then one should try to do reverse scoring or
delete the items

It is advised during development stage to keep the value of alpha a bit higher than what we
would have liked to keep , so that if the alphas deteriorate somewhat when used in a new
research context, they will still be acceptable high.

In some situations such as when a scale consists of a single item , it will be impossible
the index of reliability. In such cases some reliability assessment should be made. Test
correlation may be the only option in the single item assistance

to use alpha as
retest