The sociological study of the mental health of racial-ethnic minorities depends on the measurement quality of the instruments used to evaluate mental health. A commonly used instrument in research on mental health disparities, the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D), has not been thoroughly validated for use in the…

In this article, the authors (a) illustrate how displaying disattenuated correlation coefficients alongside their unadjusted counterparts will allow researchers to assess the impact of unreliability on bivariate relationships and (b) demonstrate how a proposed new "what if reliability" analysis can complement null hypothesis significance…

We describe the development, preliminary psychometric properties, and cross-validation of the Behavioral Evaluation of Disorders of Sleep (BEDS: Schreck 1997/1998). Parental reports of problem sleep behavior in elementary school aged children 5 years to 12 years were collected for two samples. With the first sample, an exploratory factor analysis…

Fear of success is a dispositional form of anxiety that can have harmful effects on athletes' motivation and performance; however, empirical research on fear of success in sport has been limited. Zuckerman and Allison's (1976) Fear of Success Scale (FOSS) has been the most popular fear of success measure used in sport, yet it is laden with…

Unlike their monotone counterparts, nonparametric unfolding response models, which assume the item response function is unimodal, have seen little attention in the psychometric literature. This paper studies the nonparametric behavior of unfolding models by building on the work of Post (1992). The paper provides rigorous justification for a class…

This study explores the psychometric properties of a proposed sequence of socioemotional cognitive skills in the domain of intergroup understanding as assessed by interview and questionnaire data from 91 Caucasian and Hispanic adolescents. The proposed sequence of skills was measured under two support conditions to test hypotheses about a…

This paper continues an exchange between its author and Andrew Davis. Part I addresses the attribution and ontological status of mental constructs and argues that philosophical work on these topics does not undermine high stakes testing. Part II examines the significance for testing of the connectedness of meaningful learning. Part III addresses…

When the underlying responses are on an ordinal scale, gamma is one of the most frequently used indices to measure the strength of association between two ordered variables. However, except for a brief mention on the use of the traditional interval estimator based on Wald's statistic, discussion of interval estimation of the gamma is limited.…

The regression trunk approach (RTA) is an integration of regression trees and multiple linear regression analysis. In this paper RTA is used to discover treatment covariate interactions, in the regression of one continuous variable on a treatment variable with "multiple" covariates. The performance of RTA is compared to the classical…

Using multi-group covariance and means structure analysis (MG-CMSA), this study investigated whether sex differences were present on the Dutch WAIS-III, and if so, whether these sex differences were attributable to differences in general intelligence ("g"). The sample consisted of 294 females and 228 males between 18 and 46 years old.…

The Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ) has been developed to measure the degree to which an adult with normal intelligence has autistic traits. In this paper it is evaluated for its potential as a screening questionnaire in clinical practice on one hundred consecutive referrals to a diagnostic clinic for adults suspected of having Asperger Syndrome or…

Recent psychometric results [Mem. Cogn. 29 (2001) 745] have supported a distinction between mental abilities that require a spatial transformation of a perceived object (e.g., mental rotation) and those that involve imagining how a scene looks like from different viewpoints (e.g., perspective taking). Two experiments provide further evidence for…

This study evaluated the psychometric properties of the Tourette's Disorder Scale-Parent Rated (TODS-PR), a 15-item parent-rated instrument that assesses a range of common symptoms seen in childhood Tourette's Disorder (TD) patients including tics, obsessions, compulsions, inattention, hyperactivity, aggression, and emotional disturbances.…

The present study was conducted to determine whether combining the results of multiple actuarial risk scales increases accuracy in predicting sex offender recidivism. Multiple methods of combining 4 validated actuarial risk scales--the Violence Risk Appraisal Guide, the Sex Offender Risk Appraisal Guide, the Rapid Risk Assessment for Sexual…

The authors applied contemporary methods from the evaluation literature to measure implementation in a residential treatment program for adolescent substance abuse. A logic model containing two main components was measured. Program structure (adherence to the intended framework of service delivery) was measured using data from daily activity logs…