The process of test development is rather involved. What makes good psychological tests good is usually lots of work in test development. The tremendous amount of work that goes into ensuring reliability and validity is what separates psychological tests from those found in popular magazines or used by unscrupulous people to get others to pay for some service such as therapy or personnel selection. Unfortunately, most of the work in test development is not visible in the final product. That is why we have test manuals and standards about what information appears in the manuals.

Phases of Development:

Conceptualization Ô Construction Ô Tryout Ô Item Analysis Ô Revision.

What is the trait?

How will it be measured?

What is the purpose of the test? How will it be used? Do we need a new test of this? Is the new one going to be better than ones that already exist?

What content or stimulus situations should be included?

What format should be used?

How many items?

How to score the items?

Who gets the test?

How Many?

Item-total correlations & discrimination indices (d)

Factor Analysis

Item-criterion correlations

Choosing the final items

Creating new items

Revising items