Drawing on a large, nationally representative sample of young adults (the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health; N = 15,701; M age = 29.10), we evaluated the psychometric properties of the Mini-IPIP, a 20-item inventory designed to concisely assess the 5 factors of personality. The results suggest that the Mini-IPIP has a 5-factor structure; most of the scales have acceptable reliabi...

The purpose of this paper was to validate the Spanish version of the Perceived Locus of Causality Scale (PLOC; Goudas, Biddle, & Fox, 1994). To achieve this, two studies with samples of 1535 and 400 physical education students, of ages 12 to 17 years, were carried out. The psychometric properties of the PLOC were examined through the following analyses: confirmatory factor analysis, factor inva...

3.1 HUMAN AGENCY: CLAIMING CAUSATION THROUGH INTERVENTION 15 3.1.1 CRITIQUE #1: LACK OF EXTERNAL VALIDITY (ACCIDENTALITY) 16 3.1.2 CRITIQUE #2: THREATS TO INTERNAL VALIDITY 16 3.1.3 CRITIQUE #3: PRE-EMPTION 17 3.2 GENERATIVE CAUSATION: THE DESCRIPTION OF THE CAUSAL MECHANISM 18 3.2.1 HOW CAUSATION IS CLAIMED: DIGGING DEEP 20 3.2.2 QUALITY OF INFERENCE 21 3.2.3 MECHANISMS HAVE PARTS: COMPONENT C...

Commercial truck driver Hours-of-Service (HOS) rules are periodically revised to reduce driver fatigue and improve driver health in costefficient ways. HOS research must demonstrate causal relationships between HOS parameters and important safety outcomes. Thus, two scientific requirements are internal validity (demonstration of true cause-effect relationships) and external validity (generaliza...

Readers of medical literature need to consider two types of validity, Internal and extemal. Internal validity means that the study measured what it set out to; external validity Is the ability to generalise from the study to the reader's patients. With respect to internal validity, selection bias, information bias, and confounding are present to some degree in all observational research. Select...

This article is a continuation of the previous module on designing questionnaires and clinical record form in which we have discussed some basic points about designing the questionnaire and clinical record forms. In this section, we will discuss the reliability and validity of questionnaires. The different types of validity are face validity, content validity, criterion validity, and construct ...

In two large web-based studies, across five distinct criteria, presenting survey items one-at-a-time was psychometrically either the same or better than presenting survey items all-at-once on a single web page to volunteer participants. In the one-at-a-time format, participants were no more likely to drop-out of the study (Criterion 1), and were much more likely to provide answers for the surve...

Bandura’s social cognitive construct “perceived selfefficacy” has been used widely to understand individual behavior as a function of domain-specific beliefs about personal capacities. Collective efficacy is the extension of the self-efficacy construct to organizations and groups; it refers to beliefs about collective capacities in specific domains. Our research is investigating the use of coll...

Shared leadership is viewed as an effective management form to encounter increased complexity in modern work life. However, the lack of reliable and valid instruments to assess shared leadership behaviors has limited empirical research. Based on literature in leadership and team work research a questionnaire was developed to assess four different aspects of shared leadership behavior—task-, rel...

A great deal of developmental research has relied on self-reports solicited using the "some/other" question format ("Some students think that… but other students think that…"). This article reports tests of the assumptions underlying its use: that it conveys to adolescents that socially undesirable attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors are not uncommon and legitimizes reporting them, yielding more v...