PSYB01H3 Lecture : Chapter notes
Document Summary
Reliability of measures: reliability refers to the consistency or stability of a measure of behavior. A reliable measure of a psychological variable such as intelligence will yield the same result each time you administer the intelligence test to the same person. The test would be unreliable if it measured the same person as average one week, low the next and bright the next. Put simply, a reliable measure does not fluctuate from one reading to the next: a more formal way of understanding reliability is to use the concepts of true score and measurement error. Any measure that you make can be thought of as compromising two components: 1) a true score, which is the real score on the variable and 2) measurement error . An unreliable measure of intelligence contains considerable measurement error and so does not provide an accurate indication of an individual"s true intelligence.
