🔍 The Problem and Purpose
Political scientists frequently struggle to judge whether measures are valid and reliable enough for substantive research. Stand-alone assessment tools exist, but they are rarely combined in practice, and guidance aimed at data consumers—those who must decide whether to use existing measures—is limited. This article presents a practical, integrated approach for assessing measure quality and demonstrates it on prominent corruption indicators.
🔧 A Three-Part Quality Rubric
A multimethod assessment integrates complementary tools to evaluate measure quality across three targeted dimensions:
- Content validity — whether indicators capture the intended concept fully and appropriately.
- Data-generation validity and reliability — whether the process that produced the data yields consistent, trustworthy measurements.
- Convergent validity — whether the measure aligns with other established indicators that should, in theory, converge.
🧪 Applied to V-Dem Corruption Measures
The rubric is applied to corruption measures from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project to both illustrate the assessment process and to evaluate those measures in context. The application:
- Demonstrates how each component of the rubric is operationalized using complementary methods.
- Identifies several quality advantages and disadvantages of V-Dem’s corruption measures when compared to other existing corruption measures.
đź“Ś Why This Matters
This integrated approach gives data consumers concrete steps to judge whether existing measures are suitable for substantive analysis and highlights trade-offs among alternative indicators. The rubric is intended to help researchers make better-informed choices about measurement and to foster clearer communication between data producers and users.
