Please use this discussion board to post your reflections, ideas, and/or questions about

the readings on reliability and validity. Posts should be 100-300 words.

Feel free to comment on another student's post, or create your own.
Here are a few prompt ideas:

 Something you have a question about or don’t understand.

 An idea you have for how this concept/method could apply to another topic.
 Something that surprised you or that conflicts with what you’ve learned
elsewhere.
 Discuss how well the example paper does at applying the concept.

Blacker D, Endicott J. Chapter 2, Psychometric Properties, pp. 7-13. In: Rush J, First MB, Blacker D,
editors. Handbook of Psychiatric Measures, Second Edition, Washington, D.C: American Psychiatric
Press,
2007. (Pdf available on Canvas).

The dichotomy between reliability-validity is made evident in this chapter. I do wonder though why
we opt to report 2 separate measures instead of developing some sort of composite, weighted
measure that can reflect the tradeoffs between reliability and validity.

Murphy JM, Berwick DM, Weinstein MC, Borus JF, Budman SH, Klerman GL. Performance of
screening
and diagnostic tests: Application of receiver operating characteristic analysis. Arch Gen Psychiatry 1987;
44:550-555.

Other than ROC (which was evidently novel in its application to psychiatric epidemiology at the time
this article was published), what other “computerized algorithms… for identifying clinically significant
and diagnostically recognizable disorders” have been developed to date? Has the advent of machine
learning and the current Information Age helped facilitate new types of classification, diagnosis, etc.?

Swendeman D, Comulada WS, Koussa M, Worthman CM, Estrin D, Rotheram-Borus MJ,

Ramanathan N. (2018). Longitudinal validity and reliability of brief smartphone self-monitoring
of diet, stress, and physical activity in a diverse sample of mothers. JMIR Mhealth Uhealth
2018;6(9):e176.

As someone interested particularly interested in digital epidemiology and mHealth, I

especially enjoyed reading the article from Swendeman at al. That said, I had several
comments:
 It’s great that the smartphone-based method of data collection the authors discuss is
both reliable and valid. However, one thing that consistently comes up in this field is
implementation – how do we get individuals do actually uptake technology? How do
we motivate this? Also, once an individual begins using an app or a device, how is
continuity in usage ensured?
 Another logistical point: if apps such as the one described in the study are intended to
be deployed in underserved communities, how does technology accessibility play a
role? In the study, participants were assigned smartphones – how would this scale?
 For those daily diary report that did not have “significant” association with their
corresponding gold-standards (EMA) and are therefore less reliable and less valid,
what are means to improve them?