Assessing the Validity of Experts’ Value Judgment over Research Instruments

پوختە

This study is primarily designed to assess the proportion of the usefulness, soundness and appropriateness of the experts’ overall judgments over some developed instruments, such as interviews and questionnaires by researchers in the applied linguistics research area. The study has used a mixed method tool for data collection, such as a questionnaire and content analysis.

This study tries to answer the following questions: (i) In the researchers’ viewpoint, how satisfactory is the experts’ validation of the developed instruments?, (ii) to what degree do the developed instruments of researchers align with the academic and educational standards?, (iii) how do the experts’ value judgments of the instruments align with the academic and educational standards?, (iv) what are the main challenges facing the researchers pre, during and post-validation process of the instruments?

The study has concluded the following points. The researcher participants, based on their perceptions, have provided vague impressions with regard to the experts’ value judgment of the instrument validations, i.e., they remained uncertain of their efforts during instrument validation. The results of the content analysis have confirmed that the experts’ value judgments hardly ever aligned with the academic and educational standards of validation.  By contrast, it has been disclosed that the researchers have partially followed the academic and methodological standards for designing and developing any research instruments. Additionally, finding experts specialized in the psychometric domain has been considered an underlying obstacle during the validation of the instruments.