Term Paper on Reliability and Validity - What is the Difference

 

In her article “Reliability and Validity: What's the Difference?” Laura Colossi aims to differentiate between the two social research methods: Reliability and Validity. She describes reliability as “consistency of measurement” and validity as “strength of conclusions, inferences or propositions”. Colossi further elaborates these concepts by explaining the different types of reliability and validity.

In the first half of the article, Laura distinguishes two types of reliability: test/retest reliability and internal consistency. She explains that test/retest reliability is evaluated by giving the same set of questions on two different occasions. If the results are consistent, then the measure is said to be reliable. Internal consistency estimates reliability by assessing responses from a single test. In my opinion, this approach to reliability is better because it eliminates the difficulties and possible biases of the test/retest strategy.
 

The second half of the article presents a framework for understanding research validity based on the conceptualization by Cook and Campbell (1979). Laura presents four broad types of research validity: conclusion validity, internal validity, Construct validity and external validity and also discusses the “threats” to these types of validity. While reading the article one can easily lose track of the main issues because Laura has explained twenty eight different threats to validity that deal with very specific, sometimes uncommon, situations.
 

In the end, Laura concludes the paper by stating that “validity is more important than reliability”. I believe that for a research paper to be accurate, its findings must be both reliable and valid.