Psychology week two assignment

 In a minimum of two pages:

1. Define the advantages and disadvantages to creating a measure for your dissertation.
2. Would it be best to use pre-existing measures or create your own for the constructs of interest that you identified in your week 1 assignment? Please identify the constructs discussed in the week 1 assignment. Are there existing instruments available that could assess each of those constructs?  Would there be any advantages to creating your own instrument to measure those constructs?

1. Review the course syllabus.
2. Complete the assigned readings for the week.
3. Complete the Week 2 Discussion. You must make a minimum of four substantive contributions on two separate days of the learning week to each discussion topic. Post your response to the discussion question early in the learning week (no later than Wednesday), and then respond to a minimum of three other posts. The discussion exercise closes on Sunday.
4. Complete the Week 2 Assignment: Written Assignment. In a minimum of two pages, respond to the prompts found in the assignment directions, 
5. Attend the Keiser Live session. Every week, there will be a Collaborate meeting via Keiser Live!  Attendance is not required but you are responsible for the content. The sessions are recorded and you must view the recording if you miss the live call.
6. Remember to ask questions.

see. All right. Please quiet tonight. How about everything else? How’s like, Julio? Were
you trying to speak? Or did I just see
your… I can’t hear you again. I don’t
know what happened. What’s happening? All right. I do see some
people typing in the chat, but I haven’t
heard anybody speak. So, hi, Melissa. Hi,
Natalie. Hi, Lynette. Hi. How are you? Good, how are you? My dogs were barking, so
I didn’t want to unmute. That’s okay. I understand. All right. Okay, so J.C. said his mics
being blocked. I know sometimes that happens.
I’m not quite sure why. But yet, I may have to do with. your particular computer setup. All right. Well, while we’re
at such a bunch of people have entered,
which is great. While people are entering, if anybody has any questions or comments about week one, I am going to try to grade your papers and discussions, by end of day Wednesday. So you have some
feedback before your week two
assignments are due. And in terms of your
discussions, it looked like you guys were
off to a good start. So so far, so good. And I have a quick
question about discussion. Sure. Um, let me. Hi. I’m sorry. So hi. Um, so I know several people
from residency and we chit chat here and
there. And I’m like, and I know poor bear was in here last week. It’s like, where’s everybody
in the discussion? I think he’s, I
think he’s away. I think he’s on
vacation or something. Oh, because is, is everybody in discussion or are we separated? Oh, you’re separated. Oh, I know, I’m like,
I’m so confused. Oh, yeah, maybe you
didn’t hear that. So, yeah, just to reiterate, there are two sections
of this class, and because I’m teaching
both of the sections, you know, we’re having this
combined live session so that, you know, anybody from
either session can come. But, you know, obviously when there’s multiple sections, sometimes
it’s one professor, sometimes it’s
different professors, like it’s done all
different ways. It just depends on scheduling. Obviously, we all
have to teach, you know, classes. So anyway, the whole
point is that it wouldn’t make sense
for you all to be in one class.
That would be huge. and then you don’t get
as much feedback and, you know. That’s what I
figured, but I’ve never experienced it before.
So I was like, wow, we must have a lot of
people in this class. So she probably separated
for our good and hers. Yeah, yeah. So I don’t
make the decisions about how big the
classes are, but the classes aren’t supposed
to be bigger than 30. And if we would have put
two classes together, it would have been well
over that so yeah you know obviously we’re trying
well good luck to you thank you yeah we’ll see
how I do with getting all the greedy done Wednesday
night but you know we’ll try I’m trying so um so obviously
I’m juggling dissertations and everything else but
that’s good I’m glad you have you know you’re
starting to get familiar with other classmates um I
know networking we got a network that’s great it’s very
smart um and yeah obviously some of you are very
far along in the program others of you are newer but
residency is a great way to interact with other people
so hopefully i’ll see some of you in july um during
that second week of july when we have residency
and um but yeah i really encourage you to kind of
develop your own support system whether it’s one person or
multiple people, it’s just nice when you have some
familiar, friendly faces, and you’re going through
something similar, PhD program, right,
in psychology. So, all right, great. Thank you for starting
us off with it. All right. So, obviously here we are in
week two of psychometrics. So as a reminder, you know, we have the
typical requirements in this class. Your initial discussion
post is due on Wednesday. And then you are required
to respond to three of your classmates’
original posts each week. You know, for those of you who are here, I’ve
already, you know, taken a list down
of your names and you’re required to
do two responses. So you do get excused
from one of those by attending. I see a
few more people are here. So I’ll double
check this at the end. And then just as a reminder,
be sure to include at least two scholarly
sources in each discussion and that’s important you
know even when we’re talking about something like
self-esteem and if i want you to come up with your
own definition you um you should if you’re drawing
from other sources like you get some other ideas
um you should cite those and then you know report
your own interpretation. Thank you. My lips are so dry. Okay. I think I hear some talking. So I’m going to just mute. Okay. So last week we started
on the discussion about self-esteem. And so that
was your last question. And so this week we’re
going to come up with what you think. is the best
definition of self-esteem. And that’s going to
be, you know, one of the major parts
of your discussion this week. So we
started that last week. But I want you to
provide a working definition of self
-esteem. That’s your own definition with
your definition. So it shouldn’t just
be what you think. But you should, you know, as a recent, researcher
and scholar, be citing, you know, other
sources, whether that’s Rosenberg or, you know, other scholars that are in
the field of self-esteem. So part one asks
you to provide a working definition
of self-esteem. Part two ask you to indicate
the type of response format that you would
recommend for our instrument. For example, it
could be a Lycurt scale, like, you
know, strongly agree, some would agree, neither agree nor disagree, somewhat disagree,
strongly disagree. That would be an example
of a Lycurt scale. An open-ended question
would be one where participants could give any
kind of answer. It wouldn’t just be a yes or no
answer. It would be giving some kind of some kind
of open-ended questions. It could be true
-fals questions. It could be multiple
choice where you choose one answer or
more than one answer. So, you know, this is important because with what
you’re measuring, how you’re going to measure
it is going to influence both the kind of data that
you get and the kind of analyses that you’re that
you’re able to do and you want to make sure that
you’re getting the meaning that you intended so um
you know are you trying to get a more narrow definition
of self-esteem are you trying to get a broader
definition of self-esteem so if we’re coming up with
a new instrument we need to have a new definition
for self-esteem we can’t just use like rosenberg’s
definition for self-esteem. There has to be some
kind of justification because otherwise why
create a new instrument? So, you know, obviously
there are differences of opinions for how you could
define something like self -esteem. And so this is an
exercise where you will be, you know, starting
to work on developing an instrument. And then we’re
going to go through the steps and validate it so you
know this is this hopefully it’ll be a fun process
for you guys because it is kind of a cool
experience and it’s a little different so um you know
if you you know you want to come up with what you think
for part two what would be useful what what’s going
to give you the kind of information you want what
kind of response format is going to give you
usable information. So if it’s something that’s
difficult to score or to figure out, you know,
what the trends are in the data, then that might not
be that useful for you. If you come up with a
rating scale, just make sure it’s going to be consistent
across all the items because you don’t want to
be changing and, you know, confusing your participants. if you have like a true
false question that’s going to give you data that’s
like ones and zeros like yes or no and so that’s not
going to give you as much range in your data as if
you have multiple options so it would still give you
a little variation and it would be standardized but
it’s just going to be giving you two categories right true
or false whereas multiple choice if you’re asking
things like, well, what’s your favorite color, gray,
yellow, blue, or green? That’s a, you know, a nominal variable. And so it’ll put
people into categories, but it’s not giving you any
order. So it’s, it’s kind of limited as well and
what kind of information it’s giving you. So when
you come up with a way to measure, typically you would
want to have the greatest range that would give
you. you a rich you know a richer amount of information
so for example if you’re um you know depending on
which scale you use just be sure you specify what you
would want to use and what you think would be most
useful so um for example if you use a lycurt scale um
that is something where it’s like you ask questions
about self-esteem and you have a number of different
items about self-esteem, once you have all those
Likert scale scored items, you could add
them together and it could be treated as a
continuous variable. And if you’ll recall,
when we have an interval or ratio variable, a
continuous variable, it’s richer. We’re
able to do more with our analyses and
more with our data. So generally, that would be something
that you would want to lean towards. We’d
want to go towards getting a richer array
of data, if possible. So in your research career, you might come up with a single item to assess self-esteem, but you’d want to compare
that to a self-esteem measure that’s already
validated. And so, you know, here we’re going to go
through the process of coming up with multiple items,
multiple self-esteem items, and obviously there can be a lot of different definitions, unlike height or weight
or something like that. As you could see from the start
of it last week there’s a lot of different ways
we could look at it um and then for part three you’re
going to want to discuss your approach to item
construction in other words describe the process you
use to generate the items for the instrument so where
do you start obviously your book is going to give
you some guidance on this right in terms of what
you need to do and we’re I’d like you to come up
with as part four, at least five items to include in
the new self-esteem scale. And then next week
during our live session, you guys are going to serve
as, you know, will serve as subject matter experts.
And we’re going to go go through the items and try
to narrow them down and, you know, throw out some, keep
some. But as was mentioned earlier, this is a pretty
big class. So we could have a pretty big list of items.
So I may try to do a little streamlining before we meet
because there are so many. But regardless, I will
be using your items and we’ll come up
with a list of what we think are good
items. Now, obviously, you can’t have, like, hopefully you don’t have, you know, any hard feelings about this. There’s going to be
some that are kept, some that are thrown out.
It’s all part of the process. I don’t expect
anybody’s to be perfect. Obviously, some of
it, some of them are going to be thrown
out just because they’re too similar
to other people’s. So maybe out of year
five, we keep two. It doesn’t, you know, it
doesn’t really matter. I’m not going to have names
attached to any of these. And, yeah, like Shelley
said, it’s nothing personal. So the Rosenberg self
-esteem scales are the most common. but when you
come up with your five items, I don’t want you
to use Rosenberg’s items. So you can’t copy items
from any other scale. It could have similar meanings,
but I want you to come up with them yourself. So
just, you know, think of it as we’re looking to improve
what’s already out there. And we’re going to see,
how can we do it better? You know, when you’re developing
a new instrument, you often do, people
often do go to subject matter experts
and ask them if they would suggest
any improvements. So, you know, like I developed
some items looking at kids learning from
pre-literacy materials. And if I wanted to publish
that, I would want to go to some literacy experts
and say, hey what do you think about these like
are there any you would change the wording slightly
would you take out any do you think this is
measuring what we’re intending to measure so that’s just
one stage in the validation process so we’re gonna
serve as that during class next week so that’s
always kind of a fun class because we’ll get to go
over items and kind of come up with a better
list or a more narrow list because we’ll have so many
items to be choosing from. So one other thing I want
to mention with Leichert scales is you would
generally want to go from least to most or kind of
like negative to positive. So that’s kind of the
direction you would be going. and some instruments
have what’s called reverse scoring. Does
anybody know what that means when an
item is reverse scored? I see I think Aubrey is
shaking your head, maybe. So if you reverse
score an item, it means that it is worded opposite
of the other items. Great, great. So, yeah, so if we
were to just add our items together to
make a continuous, you know, score, like we’d get
a big score, like let’s say we have 20
self-esteem items, and we want to add them
all up, and they range from one to five.
our score, then if we added them up, would go
from 20 to 100, right? So, but if we have a
reverse scored item, you know, typically
we would say, well, oh, the bigger the
number, the more positive it is, right?
Higher self-esteem. But if an item is
worded the opposite, so a high number means
low self-esteem, if you add it together, then it
would have the opposite meaning. And so with
reverse scored items, we have to do what’s
called reverse scoring. Now, there has been a change
in the attitude about reverse scored items
since I went to school. So when I went to
graduate school, the thought used to be
that having reverse scored items would reduce response
bias. And so that was considered a good thing in an
instrument that you would not like trick people, but you’d
kind of catch people if they were just scoring like
all fours or all fives. It was like you
could reduce people, you know, reduce the
number of people who were just kind of going
through without thinking about it. But now the
wisdom is not to reverse the items because people
could get confused. And so, you know, it’s
generally not advised. So, you know,
right now we don’t do as much reverse scoring. Another issue with it is
one of the steps in the process of validity and
reliability of an instrument is to calculate something
called internal consistency. And that’s kind of how well
items correlate with each other or how strongly they
are related to each other. And you want your internal
consistency to be high. And when you have reverse
scoring, the internal consistency of the
scales goes way down. So it’s generally
not as much of a, positive nowadays. When you’re developing items,
that’s for number four. Another thing I’d like
you to think about or to do is to avoid
double negatives. So you won’t want to say like, if you have two
negatives in a row, you know, you just want
to keep your phrasing simple. You don’t want to
like contradict yourself. Also, make sure you’re really stay focused on self-esteem. like you don’t want to
have items that are causal, like, you know, looking
at social media or, you know, reduces self-esteem. That would be like a causal statement. We’re not going to
say what impacts self-esteem. We’re
just going to try to measure self
-esteem and possibly different aspects
of self-esteem. So like you would,
you know, instead of saying something like,
I feel bad about myself because of how I was
treated in childhood, you know, you could say something
like, oh, I often, you know, feel insecure
about myself or, you know, I feel better
about myself when I, you know, when I have
accomplishments or whatnot. So we’re going to try to not
have those causal kind of statements. now even
though there is this issue about reverse scoring you
can you should have like at least one reverse scored
item you know i’m not that’s not to say that
we’ll use it but it’s just good to have practice of
it even though it is more of a mixed view nowadays
about reverse scoring just so that you understand
it um but i want you to be writing items about
at this particular moment in time things that would
be just about, you know, about self-esteem. So, you know, I don’t
expect perfection. I’m okay with that. I try to, you know, do my best. I have fun, whatever
it is, right? So be creative but scientific
and try to come up with some items dealing
with self-esteem. In your response to
your classmates, you can comment on the strengths
and weaknesses of the items and what
changes you would recommend, if any. And
if you want to, you know, if you want to in your, you know, after your classmates
give you some response of it, if you
want to update any of your items, you’re
welcome to do that. I won’t pull out
the items until, you know, Monday for our
session so that we have a fresh list to deal with. Okay, so obviously part
of this is all just part of the, you
know, the process. There’s no perfect instrument. You know, typically
we would only do a new instrument if there was
no other instrument. There are instruments
that measure self-esteem. So the idea is just
that we’re trying to develop a measure
that’s even. better. But it’s challenging. When I was in graduate
school, I was working on a big study about children’s
television use, and we were looking at that
in relation to their academic achievement and
other various outcomes. And one of the things
we just had, you know, it was actually quite
a large study. So one of the things we wanted
to look at, though, was whether watching TV related to materialism or
materialistic attitudes. And we came up with
some materialism items. But I have to tell you, we did not publish that. We did not use that part of the study. They were just not great items. So, you know, like a
lot of people would agree with something
like, you know, I like to go shopping or,
you know, it makes me feel better when I go shopping or
things like that, whatever. It wasn’t necessarily
like a good assessment of materialism. So that was kind
of my first experience with it. We did not spend probably
enough effort on it. We couldn’t find a good materialism
measure at that time. And so we tried it, but
it was not a success. But I feel okay with that
because, you know, a lot of other things about the
study were very successful, you know, it’s a
study that’s been cited over a thousand
times. It’s definitely impacted my
research gate score. It’s like a pretty kind of
a famous study. So I was like lucky to be involved
with it. But that piece of it, the piece about
materialism just didn’t work. So part of what, you
know, we’re having you guys learn is that it’s
not easy. You have to like test things out and there
are a lot of different steps when you’re
creating an instrument. So you would test it
with a population. Every time you test it,
you throw out items. Then you kind of, you know,
have your new instrument and you start over and
you test it out again. And then you test it for
internal consistency. You see if it works
with the same people more than once, like
test it. retest, assess it for reliability. You would, you know,
obviously have the subject matter experts
for the validity. Also assess it for construct validity, factorial validity, and content validity. So
the content validity is the subject matter experts.
So if you’re going to do that kind of study,
which again in that study I was talking about, we
didn’t have time to have years to work on that,
because we were following up with kids who’d been
in a study when they were five and they were now
teenagers. So we had to catch them while they
were still living at home. You know, it is something that takes
a few years. And that’s why we always say if you
want to develop your own instrument, that’s a
dissertation in itself. Like you can’t try to develop a new
instrument and then collect data on it for all this other
stuff. You might be able to, but more than likely
it’s just going to take so much time that that
would kind of take away from being able to do other things
because the whole process of creating a new instrument
is so time-consuming. So next, we have a
discussion this week. This should be a two
-page document, again, with cover page
and, you know, also have a cover page
and references. So discuss the advantages
and disadvantages of creating a measure
for your dissertation. In other words, is it better to use a pre
-existing measure that’s already been validated
and reliable or is it better to create your own
constructs of interests that you identified in
your week one assignment? Are there existing instruments
available that could assess? the constructs that
you were talking about? And would there be any
advantages to creating your own instruments to
measure those constructs? So in other words, what
are the pros and cons? What are the advantages and
disadvantages of creating your own instrument? And
there are both, right? There are advantages of
creating your own instrument and there are
disadvantages of creating your own instrument. So
it’s really answering this overarching question of,
is it better to create your own instrument or
use pre-existing ones. But it’s really also
just an exercise to make sure you’re aware and
understand like kind of the pros and cons of those
two different approaches. Yes, Jacey? You have a comment here? Well, I mean, those, it sounds like those
items are fine as long as they’re so individual.
You can’t combine them. You can’t say, I have a
successful job, loving family, and a comfortable
home because that would be what’s called a
double-barreled question. Actually, that’s
triple-barreled because you have three
different things. You want each person to only be answering about one
thing at a time. And so if you say or and, usually that’s not a good idea. But yes, I’m assuming you meant those as separate things. but, you know, you could look at different things like that. Obviously, we’re
going to go over, you know, some different
examples next week. But when we go through the
discussion, I’m not going to be giving you feedback
on your items because obviously we’ll talk about
those in the live session. But I will, you know,
more be probing you to be thinking about
some of the issues, other issues that
we’re discussing rather than giving you
individual feedback, if that makes sense. Okay. All right. So any other questions, comments? Again, with your assignment, be sure to include
some peer-reviewed journal articles,
scholarly books. Professional websites
also are okay, like National
Institute of Health, National Institute
of Mental Health, APA. So, you know, just
make sure you’re using scholarly websites. I
sometimes see people using things like simply psychology
or very well-mined. Those are not considered
scholarly resources. They often do talk about
like a journal article or something like that,
but because this is a graduate program, we
want you to actually be going to the journal
article. not to another site or source that’s
summarizing it because they often do it inaccurately.
I’ve seen it with my own work. Like sometimes
they just, you know, if somebody else
is summarizing it, they don’t always get it right. And obviously you want to
go directly to the source. All right. Okay. So any questions or comments? comments before we wrap up. Some of the sessions
we have will be a little longer, obviously
when we have a working session. But on a
night like tonight, if we finish a little
early, I can give you a little bit
of your time back. And that’s not really,
that’s not a bad thing. But some weeks
we do have to, we will be working together on
the self-esteem measure. And so that’s really
fun. But it will, you know, take the
whole hour, more than that. likely take the
whole hour when we’re doing that. So like
next, for example, next week is more likely
to be a longer session. All right. Well, I will still be
here for a little bit, but if anybody has any
questions or comments, if not, thank you for
coming, and I will see you in the classroom, and I
hope you have a great week. Thank you. night. Thank you. Good night. Yeah, I’m not sure
what’s going on, Daisy. Jayce, sorry about that. I’m not sure what the issue is. All right. Bye. All right. And Esther, I did mention to Dr. Wade about you having the conflict
in the class time, but hopefully you’re able to
go to her class now because we’re finished early,
so that’s great. Thank you. Sure, no problem. All right, bye-bye. Hi, Dr. Kelly. I
hope you’re doing well. How you doing?
Good. How are you? Good. Hey, just really quickly, I wanted to apologize because I wanted to join last
week’s meeting. So I just moved to Nashville.