A.V. Club's "Shirley Manson takes BuzzFeed's "Which Alt-Rock Grrrl Are You?" quiz, discovers she's not herself"

Lately, there have been a lot of quizzes popping up on my Facebook feed ("What breed of dog are you?", "What character from Harry Potter are you?"). As a psychologist who tinkers in statistics, I have pondered the psychometric properties of such quizzes and concluded that these quizzes where probably not properly vetted in peer-reviewed journals.

Now I have a tiny bit of evidence to support that conclusion. What better way to ensure that a scale is valid than by using the standard of concurrent validity (popular in I/O psychology)? This actually happened when renowned Shirley Manson Subject Matter Expert, Shirley Manson, lead singer of the band Garbage, took the "Which Alt-rock Grrrl are you?" quiz and she didn't score as herself (as she posted on Facebook and reported by A.V. Club).

From Facebook, via A.V. Club

An excellent example of an invalid test (or concurrent validity for you I/O types).

Comments

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