Describe how a researcher might handle missing data when conducting a research study. The section in your textbook will be helpful, but it will also be us

2

Psychology

Barbara Maclure

Keiser University

Dr. Kelly Schmitt

3/23/2025

Psychology

The decision about measuring constructs of self-esteem and emotional intelligence through new or existing instruments in my dissertation requires evaluation of their respective benefits and drawbacks. The decision about new or existing measures in research affects multiple aspects of the research process including data quality and both time requirements and goal achievement problems.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Creating Your Own Measure

Advantages:

1. Substance measurement offers researchers the chance to develop specific assessment tools based on precise definitions of their research constructs. Specific measures become essential when current available measures are unable to detect the subtle characteristics or special elements of the constructions you are examining. A more detailed approach to self-esteem measurement could use resilience or academic self-concept rather than general self-esteem assessments which traditional scales do not completely assess.

2. Establishing a new evaluation method represents an authentic addition to scientific knowledge. Valid and reliable measurement would strengthen current self-esteem and emotional intelligence assessment tools while providing useful research information to investigators.

3. Your instrument maintains higher validity when it encompasses precise operational definitions of your constructions because it directly aligns with their stated measurements. Your instrument will effectively measure emotional intelligence because it specifically detects self-regulation and social abilities based on your intended conceptualization of the construct.

Disadvantages:

1. The development process for creating new measurement tools takes considerable amounts of time as well as effort. The entire process for instrument development extended through considerable duration because of the need for conceptualization together with construction and pilot testing and instrument refinement. The progress of dissertation research could be delayed by instrument validation which includes item tests and reliability checks and factor analysis.

2. You face possible failure from a new measurement because it might not deliver the anticipated results. The inability of your instrument to capture construct accuracy and reliability will force you to modify it and perform further testing. The instrument's failure to measure the construct accurately will slow down research operation and might damage the validity of the complete project.

3. The use of newly created assessment tools reduces your ability to examine your data alongside current research when other scientists employ standardized measurement methods. The external validity as well as generalizability of your study may decrease due to this situation.

Using Pre-existing Measures

In contrast, utilizing established instruments has several benefits, but also some limitations.

Advantages:

1. Multiple validation tests have verified the reliability and validity of pre-established measurement methods. These measures have undergone multiple validity tests over time which proves that they deliver precise and reliable results. Psychological research makes wide use of established measures including the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale along with the Emotional Intelligence Scale by Goleman which have developed strong scientific credibility.

2. Efficiency: Pre-existing measures save time. Research data collection and analytical work will have your full attention since you avoid expending significant efforts on developing and validating a brand-new instrument. Research with precise deadlines can benefit especially from the use of pre-existing measures.

3. Established measurement methods enable research comparability with existing literature which helps interpret results better and thus increases study external validity. Due to their widespread usage the results obtained from these standardized scales can be applied across similar demographic groups.

Disadvantages:

1. The present measures do not match exactly with the theoretical constructs you are examining. Your current methodology might encounter problems because using standardized instruments prevents deeper evaluation of constructs that differ from Goleman's definition or use original methods to measure self-esteem.

2. Pre-existing measurement methods typically employ standardized scales and set formats that might restrict researchers from detecting the detailed data they need in their study. Important valuable information may escape detection due to strict data collection protocols.

Constructs Discussed

Self-esteem along with emotional intelligence serves as the academic focus of the week 1 assignment. The definition of self-esteem describes the way people judge their personal skills and worth which affects their mental state and social relationships. EI represents the capacity for a person to detect emotional states while managing their personal emotions and the feelings of those around them. The constructs play essential roles in studying psychological health together with social relationships. Established assessment tools exist to measure both constructs which include the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale for self-esteem together with the Emotional Intelligence Scale by Goleman for emotional intelligence. Professional psychologists approve these assessment methods because they demonstrate dependable accuracy in psychological research, hence making them beneficial to use according to professionals looking for dependable testing tools.

Conclusion

The dissertation research design depends on your goals because pre-existing instruments provide benefits as well as self-developed measures. Creating your own assessment tool becomes essential if you want to investigate self-esteem and emotional intelligence in a way which existing measurement methods do not offer. Research studies which need to evaluate established theories and compare them against previous analyses will find pre-existing validated measures to be more practical and efficient than developing new instruments. The assessment process should follow the requirements of your study's needs together with the accessible resources and project time constraints.

References

Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional intelligence: Why it can matter more than IQ? Bantam Books.

Rosenberg, M. (1965). Society and the adolescent self-image. Princeton University Press.

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It's spring break here for my kids, which is kind of weird because we just had snow. You have some nice weather there. Hi, J.C. Hello. How are you? Can you hear me? Yep. I can hear you tonight. Yeah. So it's working. Yeah, I got it. I'm working on it. Thank you. That's good. Nice. Well, Melissa, you look you have such a nice background there. Nice windows in your office. I'm so thankful because I've had so many offices throughout my career at different times where I've had no windows, small windows, and it's horrible when you have no windows and you come in in the dark and you leave in the dark and I can't get any sunlight, but oh well. That's hard. But at least you've got a good space now. It does make you appreciate it when you've had other things. Absolutely. Hi, Frank. I see that you're here too. And I see some others here as well. Hi, poor bear. All right. How are you guys doing this? How was your experience with the week to assignment? Any questions about that? Any challenges or overall pretty straightforward? What was that? Dr. Kelly, you talking to me? Oh, no, I was just wondering if anybody had any feedback about the week to assignment. I see Julian said all good. Just wondering how others experience was if anybody, if that was pretty straightforward or if you had any challenges with that. I just had a challenge with attention to detail, that's all. I cleared that up. Yeah. Yeah, well, it's hard sometimes, too, with the shorter papers to kind of, you know, get enough information in there that's like, like you said, attention to detail. That's like the good information you want to share and not have too much. so that can be a challenge but hopefully it was pretty straightforward I did want to talk tonight about the the new week three discussion and assignment so I'm going to talk about that we're going to spend most of our time working on creating our instrument that you guys generated items for in the discussion But first, I want to talk just a little bit about your discussion and your assignment this week so that we can, you know, know how much time we have remaining for looking through the items. So for the discussion this week, I'd like you to discuss how we should approach data collection for our self-esteem measure. So think back to Klein and what steps he said you should be doing in developing a measure. Some of these will already be done, right, by the time you get to this discussion, right? So some of the steps are going to be done. So it's like now, what are the next steps? Like what strategy should be used to figure out what items to keep? what strategies should be used to test reliability and what strategies should be used to validate the instrument and there may be different stages to data collection as your measure will change as you go through the process so often you have to go out and collect data more than one time as you go through some of these different steps so just talking just you know kind of making sure you guys are familiar with this. I know I was oh hi Charlie no problem I know I was reading a dissertation earlier today very good dissertation but the student said that they were reporting some things and said that that showed reliability and validity and they had reported Chromebacks Alpha, which is a measure of internal consistency, so how well the items hang together. So like for self-esteem, we want to end up with, you know, pretty decently high Chromebacks Alpha. Like, you know, if your measure, if your score can be anywhere from zero to one and a one is perfect, we're not going to get a one, right? But if you have above a point eight or especially above a point nine. That's very strong. That means our items are really hanging together pretty well. So that's a measure of reliability. There are other measures of reliability as well. But what the things that they had reported did not do was didn't have anything to do with validity. Like if you're reporting mean and standard deviations or correlations, that really doesn't necessarily have anything to do with validity unless it's like you're doing like predictive validity, right? Like, are you going to look at, well, does self-esteem predict self-ethicacy or some other related construct? Or does it predict, like, other measures of self-esteem? Like, does our measure of self-esteem correlate decently well with Rosenberg's measure of self-esteem? That could, you know, in those cases, you could do a correlation. But, you know, I just want to make sure you guys understand here, like, what's the difference between reliability and validity? You also had this in research methods. You know, this has talked about in some of your other classes. I believe maybe even talked about a little bit in cross-cultural tests and measurements. But here we're just really talking about what's our strategy? When we're developing an instrument, what do we need to do? So these are kind of going through like some of the remaining steps that you would ideally go through after you generated items. So, you know, just go back to your book and kind of review and talk some more about you know, strategies and what we should be doing. Susanna, did you have a question? Yes, thank you. So I was kind of confused on that first part, the strategies, because it's very, like, wild to how far we go, like we start after we have the items we have the test completed and then we try to you know explain what we're going to do after that for collecting data or is it strategy is just about the whole like all the way from a beginning so I don't know where yeah that's a good question great question so you don't need to start from the very beginning because like we started out with defining self -esteem and then we we generated items um now tonight we're going to serve as subject matter experts and try to call down our list of items because actually there was over a hundred items when I pulled them all out and I just you know reduced it to about 50 because there were quite a few, as you can imagine, duplicates or almost exact, you know, similar wording. But let's say we have 50 items. We want to reduce that. And then what are the next steps? Like here it says, what strategies should be used to figure out what items we should keep? Well, that's something we're doing tonight, but you should still talk about it, right? What does a subject matter expert do? Like, you know, what would you do if you were doing a study where you were developing an instrument and you wanted to have subject matter experts help you figure out what you should be keeping and what you should be getting rid of? And then in terms of testing reliability, next week we are going to be doing the type of reliability that I just mentioned that just was in the dissertation I read today, and it's basically at almost every dissertation I read is internal consistency. You always have to report that if you're using a survey instrument, and many of our students do use survey instruments, not everybody. But we will be doing internal consistency next week, and that is where we figure out, you know, truly which items hang together and if there's any we need to discard so we'll be you know narrowing down the list a bit tonight but that doesn't mean that's going to be our final list of items so one of the steps will be internal consistency we will do that as a class Monday night and then you guys will have a different data file that you'll do internal consistency for your assignment so next week there's a focus on that. And then there's other, you know, things like, for example, if anybody hadn't corrected their reverse scored items, I just threw those out, you know, because I gave an opportunity to fix those. But if you didn't, you know, if you didn't, then I just took them out. And then also, you know, just think about the whole process of validity, like how do you determine if it has the different types of validity. So it's just sort of basically going through all the different stages for reliability and validity and what you would be doing with a new instrument. Thank you. Yeah, I was kind of like lost because all of these steps required substantial like pages and pages to explain. So I didn't know how to put it into a post for discussion board. I'm just like shorter version of the whole thing. I don't just want to list stuff, but I want to explain. Right. Lots of it's very complex. Well, I appreciate that that you say because, yeah, that's true. I mean, there can be some complexity, but, you know, it's not necessary to do every, you know, to go into depth about every. single aspect, just kind of giving a general overview to make sure. Oh, sorry, I just want to make sure I do. Didn't lose you guys. So, yeah, just to kind of make sure you have an understanding of the different types of reliability and validity that you would be looking at with a new instrument. So just kind of a little overview. Obviously, a discussion post should not just be one paragraph. especially for something like this. If you had one paragraph, I don't know how you could possibly do this. But at the same time, you can't have two or three pages, right? It can't be incredibly long. So I guess there has to be the balance between being clear and concise and covering the materials. Joseph, do you have a question? So do you want us to talk about like the reliability and validation of the measure throughout the entire use of the measure or just like after the initial creation and like the introduction to research? So like pilot study and up to there or doubt the entire use of the measure? just you know just like in the like as you're developing a new instrument so right gotcha you know like for example you could do something like test retest but maybe that's you know maybe that's right well early stages right so it's just sort of like what do you need to do to get your your instrument together. I was just thinking like technically Rosenberg scale is still being validated with replications if it's used now. But that's all this thinking. Anyway, thank you. Yeah. Okay, sure. And any other questions about the discussion? I do see. So Shelley, I'm just asking because somebody else just sent me an email. Was there a particular challenge getting into the room? Yes. I had to go through Explorer instead of Chrome. And then I, every time I pulled up Cultural Live, it would say it wasn't available. Right. So, I mean, maybe, just so everybody, I guess, who's here knows, because there's two sections of the class, you can only enter through your classroom if you're in section one of this class. Otherwise, you have to enter through the link that I put in the announcement. it. But whether you're in section one or in section two, you can enter through the link. It's just, you know, and I didn't, it's not like any preference for section one over section two. It's just the link is in. So just so you know, if you're in section two, if you try to click Kaltura Live, you will get an error. But hopefully it'll be pretty straightforward. then um well i did um i did hit the link because i was early oh and i sat there and it said um i was being wait there you weren't there it wasn't available yet because you weren't there so i said i've been i've been there since like 620 and all of a sudden like nobody was showing up and i'm like what's happening so i went back out and then i tried culture alive and then i couldn't get in so then i tried the link again and it kept showing error so then i went to explore and did the link and that's when i got here yeah okay well i mean in the future i can i can open the class early i guess the reason why i don't do that is sometimes i open it early and people think that i'm there and like ready to uh converse and start like talking to me but i'm not necessarily there like right now i was still working on the items like so it actually is a lot to compile all these i'm not used to this you know having two sections of this class and there being so many so i had over a hundred items then i was narrowing it down too because there were a lot of duplicates but anyway i can open it early but just no don't think i'm not talking back to you it's just i may not be i may have my volume off or something like that it won't be it's It's not like that I'm ignoring you. It's just a lot of times I'm doing things before class. Okay. Well, thank you for explaining that because that helps me to know what's going on then. Okay. So Joseph, did you still have any other questions or is that just raised? That was still from last time. Okay. No problem. Okay. So for your discussion, we already talked about. this. For your assignment, your challenge this week is to describe how a researcher might handle missing data when conducting a research study. So there is a little bit in the textbook about missing data, but it's also useful to look at Chapter 4 of Tabachnik and Fidel. That's kind of a gold standard statistics book, as well as David Howell's page. define how missing data methods can affect the results in other words like you know think about the patterns so those of you who've taken RSM 801 know we also talk about that in the missing data in that class but you know it depending on the patterns of missing data it depends on you know how you would handle it but both this Tabatchik and Fidel chapter and David Howell's page are in the week four assignment area, so you do have those resources. And maybe even more importantly is this last part of the question, what precautions can you take in advance? I say you, because you'll all be researchers, at least for your dissertations. What precautions can you take before starting data collection to try to prevent the missing data. So really, I think, you know, there are oftentimes some missing data, but we as researchers can try to design our instruments and our studies so that we can try to minimize that. And so that's, you know, where you can talk about that. So again, this is just a two to three page paper should be relevant. relatively short, but just to kind of make sure you understand and you are thinking about this issue, because it does come up quite a bit when you're doing research. Susanna? Sorry, I have a question again. So the first question that has us to describe how we handle missing data. So again, there's a huge moment. of different ways? Do you want us to use the ones that they are recommended or also go through every single one that also nowadays is not recommended and explain why it's not recommended or just concentrate the most used one, recommended ones? Yeah, I would, you know, really like at an ideal situation, you would talk about how you would handle missing data if it's missing. completely are at random or missing at random versus how you would handle it if it's missing not at random. There can be different techniques depending on that, but really you don't have to spend a lot of time on techniques that are not advised or not commonly used. You know, there are, yeah, I'm sure there are many different ways you can handle missing data but really they primarily break down into three categories i would say that's what i was missing so i didn't know if you're actually here that i've had to explain the you know paravise and single invitation methods and model-based methods or we're just concentrating on the mar car and car um i was confused about that or do we have to do both no i mean i always i mean when i teach obviously like for this it's primarily reading and not you guys are learning through the reading but when i teach it in rsm 801 you know we kind of focus on the you know general categories like obviously there's deletion you can just get rid of you know the missing data um there's mean substitution, which is kind of the easiest, like SPSS. I think that's what they do with their missing data function, but there's pros and cons of that. And then, of course, there's multiple imputation, which is more like doing a regression analysis. So it's more sophisticated. If you have one missing case, is it going to be worth it to do multiple imputation? You know, so you've got to think of the cost versus benefits of like what would be the best technique versus like if you have just a few cases missing or maybe you just have a few items missing let's say we have a self-esteem instrument that has you know 10 items if somebody just missed one item like what's what's the kind of the technique you would use versus well what if like 20% of your what if 15 % of your data is missing. But it's like really valuable data. It's like a longitudinal study. So you're not going to throw up 15% of your sample. What are you going to do? So it's sort of just kind of answering those kind of questions. I don't expect you to go into detail about every single possible way you could deal with missing data. It's sort of more like bigger picture. Like does that make sense? Yes. Thank you. so with the mark i call it more car and car but with every each possibility i can kind of mention the types of how we will handle for each case right kind of okay thank you sure yeah um great all right um so um great great now what i think i'm going to do is i'm going to share my screen where i've put together um an excel sheet that has some of your self -esteem measures which great job. By the way, you guys, I thought, you know, there were a lot of great creative examples. For this instrument that we're doing as a class, we are going to use a Lycurt scale. As we talked about last week, if we use a five -point Lycurt scale, which I think many of you did, you know, and I strongly agree to strongly disagree or strongly disagree to strongly agree. We have a five -point instrument so just would think about these items go through the items thinking about obviously they're going to people are going to have to answer if they to what extent they agree or disagree or whether they're neutral like they neither agree agree nor disagree so we may have to reword some things but also we have to take some things out because there's just too many items I think like I think I started out with about 110, and then, you know, now narrowed it down to about 50-ish, because, of course, there were some duplicates, and I may not even have taken out all the duplicates. I'm sure we'll run into some more. When I say duplicate, of course, the wording's not exactly the same, but it's very close. We don't want items that are too close because they each should be measuring something unique, although they should be related, right? They should all be related to self-esteem. So we're going to pretend we're the subject matter experts. We'll take a look at the items. Please don't take any offense if anybody says it's not good or we should throw it out. That's, you know, basically what an expert would say. They might just say like, oh, I don't think that fits as well. And if we need to modify anything because we want really concise direct statements, Remember, we don't want anything double-barreled or reversed items. So I will, I'm going to turn off my video just because it's kind of, I won't be able to. I'm not going to see the screen, really. I'm just going to be sharing my screen. So please feel free to jump in and share your thoughts as we look at these. items. Can you see the Excel spreadsheet? I may need to try to make some of these items a little bigger, but… Yes, I can see it. Okay, great. Great. Okay. So let's just go through these. We'll see how many we can go through. I don't know. We'll be able to go through all of them, but hopefully we can get through a big chunk. And we're know we're not going to worry about how many we have. We're just going to go through the items and say, does this measure self-esteem? Do we want to keep it or do we want to not keep it? So what about this first one? I feel confident in my ability to handle challenges in life. I like that one. Yeah, I would say that's a good one, right? That measures challenges, challenges, which are important beyond this general self-worth. So I think that's a good one. I think that's a keeper. Okay. Number two, I am confident that I am as good as others. I like that. I like that one. Results in 16. Okay. I have kind of a question about that because I do not. I have problems with comparing people to me or me to other people in a way that I don't know what good at others means. You know, like if I'm talking about me as a patient, pretend patient, I will be confused about what other people means. And nowadays comparing people to people, social media, et cetera, can be unrealistic and can cause actually. feeling like I'm not good enough. Yeah, I'm kind of mixed on this one, but I'm with you. I think because we have so many items and hopefully we have other strong ones, I'm going to take it out because I, I mean, if you all agree, I do think that. I think that it's the same pretty much as three, and I kind of like the wording of three better. Yeah, I would agree with that. That one that we just delete it was actually mine. after I went back and read it, was kind of like, this could be a negative or a positive. Yeah. I think it's like it has some good elements, but I do agree that three is like. Better. Yeah, it's just a little, it does add a little nuance about comparing to others, but it's a little clearer how compared to others, which could be. That one was a little gray. Yeah, it could be a little gray. Okay. It takes out the qualitative. of good, basically. It just says that you're of worth as much as other people, which depending on your opinion of other people doesn't have to be that much worth, you know? Right, right. Yeah. Right. Okay, so so far we have number one and number three. Let's let's go to number four. I tend to feel satisfied with myself most of the time. I don't think so. That is good because people, They don't have to accept their limitations in their low days and high days, not just always being perfect and satisfied. That's not realistic. Yeah. I would agree with that. I don't know. There's something about this one where I'm like, it's not, I don't know. Yeah, it's maybe just. Oh, clarity too. I tend to feel satisfied. Yeah, I think there's a little too many words in here because I feel like, We're trying to assess self -esteem at a moment and time. And I think that this is like trying to make it take up too much time. Like, just like, let's assess how people feel right at this moment rather than most of the time or tend to. So it's not precise enough? Yeah. I would just like, I would just, like, we could rewrite it, but we have so many that I'm kind of more leaning towards. let's just let's just pull some out and if we have to we can always rewrite some but it would probably be deleted too then it's like of the same nature yeah um okay do you want to say more about that well i mean it's like what do you think good is and i feel like i am good enough what it's at a like or tell where does that go yeah what's good enough yeah what's good enough good enough just average or you just good enough like by your own standards so the word enough is the one that is kind of yeah okay um i respect myself as well as i respect others relative again that one can be a little bit ambiguous as well i think because what if you just don't respect other people that means you don't respect yourself right um some people might respect other people more than themselves and have more self -esteem but yeah this is a little okay so how about i feel proud of my achievements that's a good one good one yeah i think that's clear right it's like goes beyond general satisfactions. You might want that to feel good about yourself. Okay, how about I trust myself to handle challenges in life? Good. It's the same as

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