It has been suggested in the literature on family caregiving for persons with Alzheimer's dementia (AD) that levels of objective and subjective burden among carers often predict institutionalization of the persons with AD. There is a paucity of measures to assess whether perceived burden among formal caregivers may also predict movement to more…

The Spanish and English Neuropsychological Assessment Scales were devised to be a broad set of psychometrically matched measures with equivalent Spanish and English versions. Study 1 in this report used item response theory methods to refine scales. Results strongly supported psychometric matching across English and Spanish versions and, for most…

The purpose of this paper is to outline the evaluation plan for the Minnesota D.A.R.E. Plus Project, a drug and violence prevention program for young adolescents, and to present the results of psychometric analyses on the measures that will be used in the assessment of the intervention program. The survey instrument was tested using different…

The purpose of this article was to develop the Satisfaction With Love Life Scale (SWLLS). Scores from the SWLLS have favorable psychometric properties. Evidence based on relations to other variables was examined. Suggestions concerning the use of the SWLLS for research and clinical purposes are offered.

I studied rater effects in the writing and speaking sections of the Test of German as a Foreign Language (TestDaF). Building on the many-facet Rasch measurement methodology, the focus was on rater main effects as well as 2- and 3-way interactions between raters and the other facets involved, that is, examinees, rating criteria (in the writing…

A type of data layout that may be considered as an extension of the two-way random effects analysis of variance is characterized and modeled based on group invariance. The data layout seems to be suitable for several scenarios in psychometrics, including the one in which multiple measurements are taken on each of a set of variables, and the…

We propose an alternative method to partial least squares for path analysis with components, called generalized structured component analysis. The proposed method replaces factors by exact linear combinations of observed variables. It employs a well-defined least squares criterion to estimate model parameters. As a result, the proposed method…

Categories can be counted, rated, or ranked, but they cannot be measured. Likewise, persons or individuals can be counted, rated, or ranked, but they cannot be measured either. Nevertheless, psychology has realized early on that it can take an indirect road to measurement: What can be measured is the strength of association between categories in…

It is shown that in the context of the Model with Internal Restrictions on the Item Difficulties (MIRID), different componential theories about an item set may lead to equivalent models. Furthermore, we provide conditions for the identifiability of the MIRID model parameters, and it will be shown how the MIRID model relates to the Linear Logistic…

Taxometrics is a statistical tool that can be used to discern categories from continua. Taxometric analyses (MAXCOV and MAXEIG) were conducted in a large nonclinical sample (N=1,215) to determine whether extreme anxiety forms a distinct psychopathological category, an anxiety taxon. Anxiety was operationalized with self-report measures of…

A statewide data collection effort was implemented to assess the validity and reliability of a 52-item consumer assessment instrument of the cultural competency mental health providers. Following a 2-year, community-driven instrument development process, a consumer assessment tool was administered to 238 African American, Latino, and Vietnamese…

Emotional availability (EA) is a prominent index of socioemotional adaptation in the parent-child dyad. Is EA affected by context? In this methodological study, 34 mothers and their 2-year-olds were observed in 2 different settings (home vs. laboratory) 1 week apart. Significant cross-context reliability and continuity in EA as measured with the…

In IRT models, responses are explained on the basis of person and item effects. Person effects are usually defined as a random sample from a population distribution. Regular IRT models therefore can be formulated as multilevel models, including a within-person part and a between-person part. In a similar way, the effects of the items can be…

This article describes procedures for estimating various indices of classification consistency and accuracy for multiple category classifications using data from a single test administration. The estimates of the classification consistency and accuracy indices are compared under three different psychometric models: the two-parameter beta binomial,…

The Mini-IPIP, a 20-item short form of the 50-item International Personality Item Pool-Five-Factor Model measure (Goldberg, 1999), was developed and validated across five studies. The Mini-IPIP scales, with four items per Big Five trait, had consistent and acceptable internal consistencies across five studies (= at or well above 0.60), similar…