Validity
When conducting a research study, the researcher needs to pay particular attention to the reliability and validity of his or her research instruments. These concepts form the basis of the academic acceptability and even excellence in a study. Hence, any researcher should be concerned with maximizing especially the validity of his or her work. In addition to internal consistency, various forms of validity can be identified, including face validity, content validity, criterion validity, and construct validity. All these validity forms form an important component of ensuring the strength of a research project.
Internal consistency refers to the homogeneity of a measure. When a questionnaire is offered to sports apparel customers in one of the countries (United States or Kenya) represented in the study, for example, it should be ensured that all the questions would produce valid scores for specific populations. This can be done by comparing half the items of a scale with results from the other half. Consistent results would be similar for similar demographics. The lack of such consistency would mean that the questionnaire items are inconsistent and should be revised.
The implication of this for the study is that the researcher will have to ensure the validity of questionnaires before they can be submitted as evidence for the study. Any questionnaires or items considered to be inconsistent on an internal scale will have to be discarded for their potential to invalidate the study results. Time and effort implications may be at the heart of the issue here.
Validity, in general, as mentioned, has four main components. Validity refers to the true measure of the investigation being offered. This investigation, specifically, aims to measure the correlation between efforts by developed countries, such as the United States, and developing countries, such as Kenya, in marketing their sports apparel to the youth in the country. A lack of validity would also mean a lack of consistency within the results, which would deny the entire study in terms of its right to exist or to have been conducted in the first place. Validity is therefore an extremely important concept in offering a research perspective on a comparative research design such as this. The far-reaching implications...
When conducting the research, therefore, validity should be at the forefront of designing research instruments that will be used.
The first form of validity to be considered is therefore face validity. Specifically, this refers to the subjective agreement among professionals regarding the concept to be measured. In other words, there needs to be some consistency among professional opinions regarding a specific measure. In terms of the number of youth preferring Nike over other sports apparel brands, for example, researchers in the United States and in Kenya need to offer similar results for the research instrument to be valid. On the other hand, face validity can be difficult to assess, since preference and brand loyalty are such subjective constructs. The best way to mitigate this is to examine as many face validity reports as possible in incorporate the most consistent factor in the research.
Content validity is more concrete, referring to the scope or domain of interest. Hence, when examining literature regarding Kenya and the United States. One might measure the validity of literature that considers brand loyalty in other countries, such as Istanbul, and their relevance to the study. In this case, Istanbul is also a developing country. One might therefore compare literature that relates to its apparel market for its relevance to the Kenyan sports apparel market in terms of marketing strategies and the cultivation of brand loyalty.
In such a case, however, one would need to be vigilant regarding the relevance of research. Just the fact that an apparel company is located within a developing country does not mean that its marketing methods would be consistent with or valid for Kenya. It is important to ensure that research be conducted at the hand of sources that are most relevant to the research being conducted, in order to not only save time but also to be mindful of the various nuances that relate to different markets and constructs, even within third-world countries.
Criterion validity is a pragmatic measure that demands a measure to be practical. For the study on Kenya and the United States, for example, there should be a practical measure of…
