Assessing the psychometric properties of life skills measures: What is best practice?

The purpose of this chapter is to provide researchers and practitioners with guidance on how they can evaluate the psychometric properties of measures designed to assess life skills development and transfer. Before providing such guidance, it is important to explain what is meant by psychometric properties and why both researchers and practitioners should evaluate the psychometric properties of the measures they are using. First, when referring to psychometric properties, one is referring to the branch of psychology known as psychometrics, which involves “the study of the operations and procedures used to measure variability in behavior and to connect those measurements to psychological phenomena” (Furr & Bacharach, 2013, p. 10). Second, one is implicitly referring to the two cornerstones of accurate measurement: reliability and validity. Reliability refers to the consistency of scores produced by a measure, and validity is the extent to which a scale measures what it was intended to measure (Gerrig & Zimbardo, 2002).