Moore: So often there is no assessment instrument that is designed for the purpose that your research requires, so then you really are in a situation where you have to go through and develop one of your own, but that doesn't mean you don't pay attention to all the others that come close. Assessment science is like any science. You stand on the shoulders of others who have been there before. Pay attention to the other work, and you can get a lot of good ideas from that, but the bottom line is you often have to go in and create your own in order to assess what you're being asked to assess because no other instrument does that.

Mangione: There is a tremendous advantage if you can use an existing measure, especially one that is well established in the literature. There is reliability information in the literature about it. There is validity information about it. It's been reviewed by people. It's stood up to certain standards, and as Steve said, you can't always find a measure that matches your purpose, what you want to study, the phenomenon that you want to study. In that circumstance you have to create a new measure.

What you want to do is create a measure that is adding to new information. You want to see how it is associated with existing measures. You probably would want to build in, I would think, some validity check because almost any phenomenon of study has been studied. You may have a new twist, a new way of looking at it, a new theory to test, to investigate, but there are measures out there that you might want to use too to see how what you're measuring and how you're measuring it is different from what's been done before. That's something to build in in the process and to know that if you are creating a new measure you're going to be going through a much more difficult process of getting your information into the literature. People are going to question. How was reliability done? How valid is this? But if you have to do it, you have to do it and just follow those steps. Do the validity work. Do the reliability work, and study what you really think is most important to study.

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