The Youth Self-Report Form's (YSR's) factor model was derived from traditional exploratory factor analytical procedures. Assuming appropriate model specification, psychometrically invariant items, and that its items provide useful psychometric information across nations omitted from its normative samples, the YSR is widely used in cross-national…

The results of five studies illustrated sound psychometric properties of the CAS when used with adolescent, college, and postcollege samples comprised predominantly of White women. The final eight-item measure demonstrated strong test-retest reliability over a 2-week period and evidenced moderate internal consistency. Convergent validity was…

Relational personality theorists propose that women have a tendency to view themselves in the context of relationships with others and to make decisions to optimize and maintain relationships. The current study explored whether relational identity may underlie women's career interests as measured by Holland's typology and examined possible…

This article reports on a psychometric study examining the validity and reliability of the My Class Inventory-Short Form for Teachers, an accountability measure for elementary school counselors to use as they evaluate aspects of their school counseling programs. As a companion inventory to the student version of the My Class Inventory-Short Form…

On the basis of a self-efficacy framework, the authors present a theoretically sound model explaining the behavioral intentions of students to apply teamwork skills they learn in business courses. The model links variables at least partially controllable by faculty in a classroom setting to students' behavioral intentions to use teamwork skills.…

Qualitative research has increased in popularity among social scientists. While substantial attention has been given to various methods of qualitative analysis, there is a need to focus on strategies for collecting diverse forms of qualitative data. In this article, the authors discuss four sources of qualitative data: participant observation,…

[Slides] presented at the Annual National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME) in New York in March 2008. This presentation explores the demographic information as well as how and where educational measurement professionals are in the field.

This study used confirmatory factor analysis to examine the structure and factor loadings of an authoritarian parenting scale. The study used data from 315 married couples who had toddlers participating in the Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Project located in 14 communities across the United States. The sample was diverse and consisted…

Confirmatory factor analysis for ordered-categorical measures (CFA-OCM) and rating scale item response theory (IRT) analyses explore measurement bias across gender on the Children's Depression Inventory (CDI) in a community sample of 779 children in the third and sixth grades. Given the set of statistical criteria, IRT and CFA-OCM generally…

A number of explanations have been offered for the differences in test performance among various population subgroups. This paper begins with a discussion of these explanations including the psychometric explanation that group differences are due to bias in the test. An overview of bias research argues that results to date are inconclusive. A…

This digest presents a list of recommendations for writing multiple-choice test items, based on psychometrics statistics are typically provided by a measurement, or test scoring, service, where tests are machine-scored or by testing software packages. Test makers can capitalize on the fact that "bad" items can be differentiated from…

Three important methods areas of multivariate analysis that are not always thought of in terms of latent variable constructs, but for which latent variable modeling can be used to great advantage, are discussed. These methods are: (1) random coefficients describing individual differences in growth; (2) unobserved variables corresponding to missing…

Three types of data were factor analyzed using principal components extractions with orthogonal and oblique rotations to test publisher claims for construct validity of the Personal Profile System (PPS). Behavioral descriptor data from 1,045 senior non-commissioned Air Force officers were factored as raw data, mean corrected data, and standardized…

A cognitively based theoretical framework for the assessment of domain competence is proposed. The basic thesis is that to be knowledgeable one must know how the important concepts of a domain are interrelated. This thesis implies that any valid assessment of knowledge must capture these structural properties. The implementation of a structural…

Many data analysis problems in psychology may be posed conveniently in terms which place the parameters to be estimated on one side of an equation and an expression in these parameters on the other side. A rule for improving the rate of convergence of the iterative solution of such equations is developed and applied to four problems. (Author/RC)