The development, validity, and reliability of the Researcher Investment Tool

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.