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Ouestion about Reliability and operational validity

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A planner wants to assess road quality. He sends a questionnaire to a sample of residents and asks them to evaluate road surfaces, repair quality, and amount of traffic. He finds the results of limited value, so he assigns engineers to travel through the neighborhoods to rate the roads. The engineers are given general instructions but no written rating forms. Still dissatisfied, he develops a rating form that lists the number of potholes per mile, the depth of potholes, the thickness of asphalt, the width of the roadway and similar measures.
(a) Comment on the reliability and operational validity of each approach.
(b) Which approach would you consider the most operationally valid? Comment on the ways each approach could be modified to improve its reliability and validity.

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Information about how to gather optimal data for quantitative purposes.

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A planner wants to assess road quality. He sends a questionnaire to a sample of residents and asks them to evaluate road surfaces, repair quality, and amount of traffic. He finds the results of limited value, so he assigns engineers to travel through the neighborhoods to rate the roads. The engineers are given general instructions but no written rating forms. Still dissatisfied, he develops a rating form that lists the number of potholes per mile, the depth of potholes, the thickness of asphalt, the width of the roadway and similar measures.

First of all, my professional preference for collecting and assessing data is through a quantitative survey/process. The reason for this is numbers do not lie. Quantitative data is hard, reliable data. In my opinion, qualitative data is unreliable because in my mind qualitative data comes down to opinion and in my mind qualitative data is not reliable.

(a) Comment on the reliability and operational validity of each approach.

Resident Questionnaire
In this case there are a number of problems that the question does not clarify. For example, how was the sample chosen? Was the sample chosen through a random process or was the sample chosen as a matter of convenience over clear, scientific method. A clear random process may have been through polling all residents in the neighborhood and choosing a ...

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