Put together, these questions can give a sample of the person's behaviour. They can answer self-report questions on the basis of their past behaviour or their possible response to various imagined situations.

A quicker method is to get the answers from them directly, through self-report. We can also get information about the person from those in constant contact with them or from records about them. Understanding and assessing a person's behaviour usually requires in-depth interaction with or observation of the person over a period of time. In this article, we take the reader through easy-to-follow practical steps involved in three processes: developing a test, validating it and translating it.

The process of developing and validating an instrument is in large part focused on reducing error in the measurement process. For any scale to be used within a specific sample, it has to be valid in that group – hence, it will require validation prior to use. The need also arises in the field of social sciences either to develop a new scale or to translate a scale into the local language for use in a particular population. There will be no clinician working in the broad area of mental health who has not used a psychological test/rating scale, either for research or in their clinical practice.

master the method to translate an existing psychological test to create an equally valid scale in another language.

understand the concepts and techniques to make the constructed test psychometrically robust.

learn the steps to construct a test for any social science concept that needs to be measured.

After reading this article you will be able to:

Reliability meaning in psychology