Aims

- to familiarise the students with the various tools to leasure attitudes, beliefs and beahviours; to ensure the control of the technics aimed at examining the liability and validity of the tools; to help in the choice of the best fitted technics to answer the concerned question; to sensitize the students to the pragmatic dimension of the design of questionnaires and of the context of survey; to provide the skill to analyse the constrains of feasibility of the studies or surveys.

Main themes

- causality (thinking on the concept of cause; correlation versus causality; epistemology in social psychology)
- recall of the basic concepts bearing on the measure in psychology (levels of measure and statistical consequences, notion of psychological construct, liability and validity of the tools and their relations).
- the various tools to measure the attitudes and beliefs (psychometrical and psychophysical approaches, metrical features of the various tools, alternative technics)
- the technics aimed at examining the liability and validity of the tools (analysis of a classical item and the internal consistency, the multi-trait multi-method matrix of Campbell and Fiske, factorial analysis)
- exploration of the data from the model test (research of a sustainable model, testing of the models, correlation and causality: the regression models, introduction to the models of structural equations)
- the methodological aspects related to the design of a survey
- the socio-cognitive approach of the survey situation
- the organisational and economical feasability of the survey and exploitation of the results

Content and teaching methods

- to familiarise the students with the various tools to leasure attitudes, beliefs and beahviours; to ensure the control of the technics aimed at examining the liability and validity of the tools; to help in the choice of the best fitted technics to answer the concerned question; to sensitize the students to the pragmatic dimension of the design of questionnaires and of the context of survey; to provide the skill to analyse the constrains of feasibility of the studies or surveys.

Other information (prerequisite, evaluation (assessment methods), course materials recommended readings, ...)

Lectures - reading portfolio
Practical exercises to design some tools of measure