The impact of scale length on reliability and validity

✍ Scribed by Richard G. Niemi; Edward G. Carmines; John P. McIver

• Publisher: Springer Netherlands
• Year: 1986
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 294 KB
• Volume: 20
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0033-5177
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00123086

✦ Synopsis

The conventional wisdom in political science seems to hold that simply increasing the length of scales automatically increases their reliability and that validity supposedly increases merely as the result of increased reliability. This paper shows analytically and by way of example that -despite their status as conventional wisdom -neither of these statements is true without qualifiers that seem to be unrecognized. The paper thus clarifies the relationships among scale length, reliability, and validity.