Research Interests

Kim Barchard is interested in test development and data quality. She collaborates with faculty and students in three areas. First, Dr. Barchard develops and evaluates new tests and scoring procedures. Her work has focused on tests of Emotional Intelligence (the ability to perceive, understand, and manage emotions in oneself and others), but she is open to collaborative test development projects in any area of psychology. Second, she develops and evaluates statistics that assess test quality (typically described as reliability and validity). Her work has focused on inferential procedures for coefficient alpha, which is one measure of internal consistency reliability, but she is open to collaborative projects related to validity statistics as well. Finally, Dr. Barchard develops and evaluates procedures to improve data quality. This includes data entry procedures that minimize errors and statistical procedures that detect anomalous data.

Dr. Barchard teaches statistics and test development at the graduate and undergraduate levels. Her 2001 doctoral degree in psychometrics from the University of British Columbia covered both test development and the use of statistics in psychology.