An Explanation of Statistical Tools from DocumentingExcellence.com
A consulting practice focusing on working with colleges', organizations', and individuals' utilization of quantitative and qualitative assessment tools to analyze and document their quality outcomes through providing staff development, research design and analysis, and psychometric evaluations.

Measurement Criteria

Measurement Processes

Measurement Issues and Challenges

When considering measurement processes several issues are important.  Each of these issues has relevance to appropriate and effective assessment, evaluation, and interpretation of research data.

bullet Issues of qualitative versus quantitative research focus on both research methodology and perspective.
bullet Qualitative research focusing on understanding the gestalt.
bullet Quantitative research focusing on describing measurements of a phenomenon. 
bullet Issues of scale structure focus on critical characteristics of a scale.  They are significant because these structures limit, in part, which statistical procedures can and should be used in analyzing findings.
bullet Dichotomies - True/False
bullet Nominal, categories
bullet Ordinal, rank
bullet Interval
bullet Ratio, counts
bullet Issues of how measurement processes focus on the nature of phenomenon.
bullet Observations and counts
bullet Opinion and belief
bullet Ipsative measurements
bullet Norm-referenced assessments
bullet Criterion-reference assessments
bullet Issues of how scale results are distributed focus on how data arrays itself along a scale.
bullet Normal distributions - Bell shaped curve
bullet Skew
bullet Kurtosis
bullet Uniform distributions
bullet Bi-modal and other unique distributions


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Copyright © 2012 by Peter T. Klassen, Ph.D. Principal, www.DocumentingExcellence.com
8 February, 2012