Reliability and its Importance

Reliability is defined as a measurement procedure that has stable results or the consistency
of the measurement.

Reliability occurs when an experiment or research investigation is carried out repeatedly

under the same conditions and with the same variables, and the results of the data are the same or
nearly the same as previous experiments. Although all research may have error to some extent, for
example because of participants not completing the task or doing it correctly, but the amount of
error establishes the amount of reliability. If the amount of error is high then the reliability is low,
if error is low then the reliability of the research is high.

This is obviously important because say researcher carried out a research experiment 100
times and every time the results came back completely different, this would tell us either there is
a problem with the research or that it disproves our hypothesis and the research is not sufficient
evidence to suggest our hypothesis is correct, concluding that the reliability is low. However, if
researcher carried out an experiment 100 times and the results came back the same every time then
it would show that our hypothesis and research is reliable and can therefore be used as scientific
evidence.

So, without reliability within our experiments researcher could not determine whether any
research carried out was actually evidence to suggest hypothesis of experiments have been found
significant. This is because with different results of data for research one could not find correlations
and trends and patterns in his work to suggest that the findings are scientific evidence and as
psychologists could therefore not be able to find out more from the statistics and research. Thus
reliability in a research is necessary to make it a solid research evidence
Reliability is also important in the research due to its connection with validity as without
reliability it could be argued that results could not be valid. Without validity there is no point in
having reliability. Sometimes reliability is present in the absence of validity as reliable measure is
measuring something consistently but that doesn’t mean that the researcher is measuring what he
intent to measure. Therefore high reliability is important for consistency of the measure but doesn’t
in fact mean that the experiment is valid. So whenever the psychological test or research is being
conducted one should consider both aspects i.e. validity and reliability