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

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.

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.

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.

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).

This novel RIT may be useful to evaluators when measuring the impact of investments designed to support early career clinical and translational researchers.