Despite on-going calls for developing cultural competency among mental health practitioners, few assessment instruments consider cultural variation in psychological constructs. To meet the challenge of developing measures for minority and international students, it is necessary to account for the influence culture may have on the latent constructs…

A sense of direction (SOD) computes the body's facing direction relative to a reference frame grounded in the environment. The authors report on three experiments in which they used a heading-recall task to tap the functioning of a SOD system and then correlated task performance with self-reported SOD as a convergent test of the task's construct…

The construct validity of the Bully/Victim Questionnaire (Olweus, 1996a) as a measure of bullying was examined. Although researchers have defined bullying and reactive aggression as two distinct types of aggression, this study examined how closely related they are using empirical data. Reports from students and teachers on measures of bullying and…

The purpose of this research was to investigate the construct validity of the Enrolled Student Survey (ESS) as applied to East Tennessee State University students. It has been suggested that cultural differences among students may cause the latent constructs underlying student satisfaction to be developed differently. The ESS is a…

The validity of the Southam News 1987 survey of literacy in Canada was questioned relative to its content and structure. The survey viewed literacy as a set of complex information processing skills and adopted a hierarchical view of these skills. This hierarchy model set up illiteracy as a deficiency. The Southam study's underlying assumption was…

The construct validity of content standards is addressed in terms of their representative coverage of a construct domain and their alignment with the students' cognitive level of developing expertise in the subject matter. The construct validity of performance standards is addressed in terms of the extent to which they reflect increasing levels of…

The multitrait-multimethod (MTMM) paradigm is used widely to assess construct validity, but D. A. Kenny and D. A. Kashy (1992) lament that even after 30 years we still do not know how to analyze MTMM data. The Composite Direct Product (CDP) model has recently attracted considerable attention. Its strengths and weaknesses are evaluated, and a…

Burnout measures cover the same ground as depressive symptom scales. Problems with burnout scales include their vulnerability to attribution errors. The few studies having both burnout/stress and psychological symptom measures suggest considerable overlap in the scales. Three cross-sectional studies from very different geographic areas reveal high…

Past research has suggested that the Kansas Marital Satisfaction Scale (KMS) is a brief, reliable, and valid measure of marital satisfaction. This study was conducted to: (1) examine responses on the KMS from a national sample of couples; (2) assess the construct validity of the KMS through a comparison with the Locke-Wallace Marital Adjustment…

A biographical inventory has been used in the selection of students for naval aviation training since World War II, and its validity in predicting their retention-attrition in this training has been well established. This study investigated the constructs underlying the inventory and their relations to students' retention-attrition. A factor…

Development and determination of the construct validity of a scale designed to assess aversion to computers are described. Based on a social learning model emphasizing efficacy, outcome, and reinforcement, the Computer AVersion Scale (CAVS) was developed for use with mental health clients who were high school age and older, as well as mental…

The objective description and identification of variables that meaningfully distinguish reasoning skills couched in written discourse was studied, comparing scores obtained from different perspectives on the same writing samples. A total of 406 writing samples on 2 topics by 203 students who had taken the Graduate Record Examinations, mostly…

This paper investigated the reliability and construct validity of a 30-item scale in measuring the attitudes of teachers in Australia toward the integration of handicapped children into regular schools. The Attitude Toward Mainstreaming Scale, which was designed by Larrivee and Cook (1979), has been used in evaluation studies in the United Sates…

This paper analyzes ways in which the methods used to measure psychological constructs contribute invalidity to measurements. The analysis distinguishes between inadequacies stemming from the behaviors selected for measurement and the harmful effects generated by the measurement operations themselves. (BS)

This study evaluated the validity of the Type A behavior pattern as measured by paper-and-pencil questionnaires. The Jenkins Activity Survey, Framingham Type A Scale, Thurstone Activity Scales, a new bipolar adjective Type A measure, and measures of achievement and nurturance needs were completed by 418 students. (Author/BS)