Cultural consensus theory (CCT) is a data aggregation technique with many applications in the social and behavioral sciences. We describe the intuition and theory behind a set of CCT models for continuous type data using maximum likelihood inference methodology. We describe how bias parameters can be incorporated into these models. We introduce…

A general model is presented for homogeneous, dichotomous items when the answer key is unknown. The model is related to the two-class latent structure model with the roles of respondents and items interchanged. Iterative maximum likelihood estimates of parameters and Monte Carlo assessment of estimation methods are described. (TJH)