Reliability and validity of analytical construct in the case of virtual work

Abstract

Social scientists are interested in understanding social reality as accurately as possible, trying to measure observable and indirectly measurable phenomena as well as the phenomena that still need to be constructed for measurement. Constructing social phenomena so that they can be measured is the everyday work of social scientists as the development of societies constantly brings forth new phenomena that attract authors’ interest to investigate and interpret them. Technology-enhanced telework as a research theme has become topical because of advances in information and communication technology and the fact that they have become widespread. The biggest obstacle to the investigation of technology-enhanced telework (also called virtual work) is the huge range of different definitions and approaches; virtual work mostly described rather than measured in surveys. The current article focuses on the reliability and validity of the analytical construct of virtual work previously developed by the author on the basis of service sector organisations. Reliability is quite simple to measure – Chronbach’s alpha is well known to measure it, but there are several approaches to the measurement validity beginning with the first authors Cronbach and Meehl [14] to Messick [32], Kane [29], Bornstein [7] and Slocum et al [48]. Every researcher adds a new point of view that makes understanding and using the methods of validity more complicated, but it is important to find a proper and suitable way to analyse the validity of construct of virtual work. In the article, the author will analyse the reliability and validity of two models which measure technology-enhanced telework.