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Leah McClimans Department of Philosophy University of Toronto February 1, 2007 Thursday, 5:00-6:30pm Nursing, Room 127 Valid measures of quality of life require that researchers and respondents understand a measure's questions and answers in the same way. Indeed, the accuracy of our construct validity claims depends on this presumption. To ensure the accuracy of our validity claims and the validity of our measures researchers strive to create questions that constrain how respondents will understand them. I argue, however, that attempting to constrain how respondents understand the questions in a measure is not the appropriate solution because we cannot know in advance of applying a quality of life measure to a particular context just what the questions in the measure ought to mean. But if we cannot know in advance of administering a measure how to best understand the questions therein, then the validity of our measures cannot depend on conveying the meaning researchers imagined to respondents. Nonetheless, construct validity does depend on this conveyance of meaning. I finish by sketching an alternative to construct validity and suggest that we might better "validate" our measures if we situate them within a dialogic framework.  |
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