Introduction to Test Construction in the Social and Behavioral Sciences: A Practical Guide

Rating:
Summary: Scale development for newbies
Review: Fishman and Galguera have created an extremely useful guide for students setting out to create their first test instrument. While most of the material will probably be covered in different courses during graduate school, this summarizes all the pitfalls, hard learned lessons and tricks of the trade in one very readable (and suprisingly short) volume. While the reader is expecte to have a very basic understanding of statistics, you will not need any specific statistics knowledge in order to benefit from this book. The authors include plenty of examples and figures to help those who have been out of a stats classroom for too long. The main focuse of the authors is on helping the reader make sure that their tests are valid and reliable. To do so, they walk the reader through the stages of scale development, focusing on testing and re-testing scales before the data analysis starts. Pick this up when you're ready to start designing your first scale. You'll be happy you did.

Rating:
Summary: Practical but Not Dumbed-down
Review: This is a practical and useful book that works for people who don't have a statistics background. This book helped me get moving with my research. I'm glad I came across it BEFORE I collected my data! If you're doing quantitative research, you need this book.