The Meaning and Consequences of “Reliability”

Abstract

The concern behind my question, “Can there be validity without reliability?” (Moss, 1994), was about the influence of measurement practices on the quality of education. I argued that conventional operationalizations of reliability in the mea-surement literature, which I summarized as “consistency, quantitatively defined, among independent observations or sets of observations that are intended as inter-changeable ” (Moss, 1994, p. 6)—unnecessarily privileged certain assessment prac-tices over others. I argued that consideration of alternative epistemologies, in this case, hermeneutics, might: (a) expand the range of assessment practices consid-ered sound and, more importantly, (b) illuminate taken-for-granted theories and practices of psychometrics for critical review. I characterized hermeneutics as involving “a holistic and integrative approach to interpretation of human phenomena that seeks to understand the whole in light of its parts, repeatedly testing interpretations against the available evidence until each of the parts can be accounted for in a coherent interpretation of the whole” (Moss, 1994, p. 7). I cited familiar examples from higher education of practices

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