Investigating the reliability and validity of the infrared tympanic thermometer: a learning experience

This series of articles to date has discussed points that readers should be looking for when reading and critiquing a researcher article. This article presents a brief report of a research project investigating the reliability and validity of the infrared tympanic thermometer (ITT) in afebrile subjects. Using four subjects and 40 temperature diads, the ability of the ITT to predict the subjects' temperatures obtained with a mercury thermometer was very poor (regression coefficient = .39). Test-retest reliability using the same data set resulted in an equally poor correlation coefficient (r = .19). A critique of the methodology of the study is provided as a learning experience.