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Surveys With Reliability and Validity
Have you been looking for an online assessment for one of the topics listed at the right? These are serious projects, and substantive decisions are made based on their results. If the tool you use for one of these projects does not have reliability and validity, you put your organization and your career at risk. A quick, "cost effective" online survey, without being a reliable online survey with validity, could end up costing you more than you want to know.
ReliableSurveys.com is your source for online surveys and questionnaires with provable reliability and validity.
You've seen those online survey web sites. They are slick and inexpensive. They have neat interfaces that let you create your own survey,
 You could be making business decisions based on survey results that don't mean anything.
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invite others to participate — they can make you look really talented to your co-workers, maybe even to your boss.
Some of them have catchy tag lines about their services, like "Easiest way to ask, fastest way to know", or "Because knowledge is everything". It certainly sounds like the results of these surveys provide real, actionable information that can be used to drive decisions and performance in the organization.
Here's the "dirty little secret" they don't want you to know about the surveys and questionnaires they offer: They can't tell you if the survey you create is reliable. And if it can't be shown to be reliable, you can't prove that its results are valid. What's reliability and validity? In real simple terms, reliability means the results would look the same if you repeated the survey with the same people the next day. Validity means your instrument measures what you say it measures.
How Do You Know Something From a Survey?
The truth is, you don't know anything from a survey unless you know how reliable the survey is. An unreliable questionnaire is worse than an unreliable car. At least with a car, you know when it stops working. A questionnaire, on the other hand, will always produce numerical results, even if they're meaningless. You could be making business decisions based on survey results that don't mean anything. Only a test of reliability can tell you if you should trust the results.
You won't see it on the typical survey web sites, but you can read as much as you like about reliability and validity here — we want you to know how important they are. These concepts have been an integral part of survey and questionnaire development for 60 years. As long as we have had questionnaires and surveys, we have known that you can't just throw a bunch of statements together with some agree/disagree scales, and have data for mission critical decision-making. But the internet has allowed the IT people to turn the process of designing and implementing surveys into a "do-it-yourself" activity. And many behavioral scientists, who ought to know better, have become willing accomplices by sponsoring these sites and promoting their use.
The same IT industry did amazing things with the automobile engine, with internal computers that monitor engine functioning and optimize timing and ignition while we drive. We now are able to drive 100,000 miles without thinking about when we need to "tune" the engine. But the same sophistication has not been built into the typical online questionnaire. Just because the survey provider doesn't talk about it does not mean it is all being taken care of somewhere inside the computer.
We don't have to think about our automobile engines, but we do have to be aware of the difference between a "do-it-yourself" survey and one with reliability and validity. If you have been considering a project like the ones in the list on the right, and want an online instrument you can defend against the critics, we invite you to read about our services. We are measurement experts, not IT people. We have been delivering quality assessment tools for more than 25 years. When you stand before a group of your colleagues and managers, and can report on the reliability and validity of the results you are presenting, you will be glad you developed your project with us.
Reliable Surveys, Valid Surveys
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