Brenda M Joly, Carolyn Gray, Kassandra Cousineau, Karen Pearson, Valerie S Harder
{"title":"The development, validity, and reliability of the Researcher Investment Tool.","authors":"Brenda M Joly, Carolyn Gray, Kassandra Cousineau, Karen Pearson, Valerie S Harder","doi":"10.1017/cts.2024.673","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><strong>Background: </strong>Over the last two decades, there have been significant investments designed to advance clinical and translational research (CTR) with an emphasis on supporting early career investigators and building a cadre of skilled researchers. Despite the investments, there are no comprehensive measurement tools to track individual-level progress along the research continuum as supports are put in place.</p><p><strong>Objective: </strong>The Researcher Investment Tool (RIT) is a novel tool that was created to provide a consistent approach for measuring individual-level changes in the research career trajectory of investigators receiving support from CTR programs.</p><p><strong>Methods: </strong>The RIT is a 90-item questionnaire, with eight domains and four sub-domains, designed to measure a researcher's experiences and perceptions. Several rounds of testing were conducted to assess the tool's face and content validity as well as the internal consistency and test-retest reliability.</p><p><strong>Results: </strong>Psychometric testing revealed strong content validity and good internal consistency with Cronbach's alpha coefficients ranging from 0.85 to 0.97 across all domains. Test-retest reliability results also revealed stability in the domain measures over time with Pearson's correlation coefficients ranging from 0.70 to 0.98 for all but one domain (.53).</p><p><strong>Conclusions: </strong>This novel RIT may be useful to evaluators when measuring the impact of investments designed to support early career clinical and translational researchers.</p>","PeriodicalId":15529,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Clinical and Translational Science","volume":"9 1","pages":"e160"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0000,"publicationDate":"2025-08-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12392352/pdf/","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Journal of Clinical and Translational Science","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1017/cts.2024.673","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"2025/1/1 0:00:00","PubModel":"eCollection","JCR":"Q3","JCRName":"MEDICINE, RESEARCH & EXPERIMENTAL","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Background: Over the last two decades, there have been significant investments designed to advance clinical and translational research (CTR) with an emphasis on supporting early career investigators and building a cadre of skilled researchers. Despite the investments, there are no comprehensive measurement tools to track individual-level progress along the research continuum as supports are put in place.
Objective: The Researcher Investment Tool (RIT) is a novel tool that was created to provide a consistent approach for measuring individual-level changes in the research career trajectory of investigators receiving support from CTR programs.
Methods: The RIT is a 90-item questionnaire, with eight domains and four sub-domains, designed to measure a researcher's experiences and perceptions. Several rounds of testing were conducted to assess the tool's face and content validity as well as the internal consistency and test-retest reliability.
Results: Psychometric testing revealed strong content validity and good internal consistency with Cronbach's alpha coefficients ranging from 0.85 to 0.97 across all domains. Test-retest reliability results also revealed stability in the domain measures over time with Pearson's correlation coefficients ranging from 0.70 to 0.98 for all but one domain (.53).
Conclusions: This novel RIT may be useful to evaluators when measuring the impact of investments designed to support early career clinical and translational researchers.