Question

A Manager asks the job applicants an interview question: Assume that you are given the sales figures for the past 12 quarters.  You have to make sales projection for the next four quarters.  Can you explain how will you go about it?

The company is interested in finding out the content validity ratio (whether the question is relevant for the job of a financial analyst).  The company asked 25 different Directors of Finance to tell them whether the item is essential or not essential. The company found that 15 subject matter experts found the question as essential and 10 did not find them as essential.  What is the content validity ratio? What can we say about the content validity of the question based on the CVR you obtained?

Answer 1

Content validity ratio:

A content validity ratio (CVR) is a metric developed by Lawshe in 1975. It validates if an instrument (questionnaire, survey or question) measures the content area it is expected to measure. In other words, it suggests if an instrument is worthless or efficient. CVR is calculated by the below formula

CVR= [(E-(N/2))/(N/2)]

Where

E= The number of people who had rated the given instrument as essential

N= Total number of respondents

In the given situation,

E= 15 and N=25

Hence CVR= [(15-(25/2)/ (25/2)] = 0.2

CVR ranges between -1 to 1. Closer the value is to 1, suggests the item is useful and the closer it is to -1 suggests it’s not useful. Now in this case although 0.2 is positive which suggests the question is useful, the value is very far from 1 suggesting that it is not a definitive measure that can be used to effectively judge a candidate on the content area