Validity Assessment in the Knowledge & Information Science Researches

The present study has been conducted to evaluate amount of attention to validity assessment process of research tools, by reviewing the articles published in knowledge & information science journals in Iran over the past 10 years. In this research, articles of 8 Persian scientific and research journals in field of knowledge & information science in Iran, published between 2006 to 2015, were analyzed in a content analysis method. In total, 1763 research articles related to 211 issues of journals were analyzed and research tools and methods for determining the validity of research tools investigated. According to research findings, there was no reference to validity of research tools in 36.87% of reviewed articles. In 23.22% of articles, only validity of research tools was confirmed and method and procedure for determining the validity were not mentioned. In 4.31% of articles, researchers stated that validity of research tools was confirmed in previous studies and therefore they did not consider the validity. In 375 articles (32.38%), method of determining validity of tools was mentioned. In terms of the methods used to measure validity of tools, results indicated that 16.66% of articles evaluated their tool validity by face validity and 20.30% by content validity method. Of other types of validity, the criterion validity was lowest, and only 2 articles (0.17%) used this method to assess validity of their tools. 5.26% of articles also used construct validity, which has highest level of validity. Also, results showed that a very small number of journals in the research population have published articles related to psychometrics of research tools. So, the knowledge & information science journals are required to pay more attention to publish articles related to validity assessment of research tools for more familiarity with this process and its importance in designing tools by researchers. Also, journals in this area should be more sensitive on report of validity assessment process of research tools in the methodology section of articles in the process of reviewing articles.