Differential responses to Female and Male Lawyer scale items on the Strong-Campbell Interest Inventory (SCII) were analyzed for 67 male and 35 female law students. The results are discussed. Because there is an implicit bias in maintaining separate sex scales, the author suggests the SCII should be considered an intermediate step to a combined…

In the first of these three articles, methods for reporting vocational interests which do and do not reflect sex role stereotypes are examined. The second article is a reply to problems noted in the first article, and the third article is a rebuttal by the first authors. (Author/HMV)

Changing perspectives in educational intelligence testing are traced from a genetically deficient model to a culturally disadvantaged or deprived model to a culturally different model. It is argued that if comparisons are to be made between people, they should be made within the context of the cultural and socioeconomic group structure of each…

Undertaken at the request of the U.S. Employment Service (USES), this study assesses the validity and fairness of the General Aptitude Test Battery (GATB). The U.S. Department of Labor is considering whether to promote the use of the GATB throughout the USES to screen many of the 19 million persons passing through the system annually in search of…

Two aspects of rater accuracy in performance assessment were analyzed: rater stringency/leniency, and rater consistency. Data were obtained from three administrations of an oral certification examination in a health profession. The examination consists of clinical cases in four content areas or subspecialities. A total of 364 candidates were…

The purpose of this investigation was to identify item factors that may contribute to differential item functioning (DIF) for black examinees on Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) analogy items. Initially, items were classified according to several possible explanatory factors. Preliminary analyses identified several factors that seemed to affect DIF…

The agreement between item response theory-based and Mantel Haenszel (MH) methods in identifying biased items on tests was studied. Data came from item responses of four spaced samples of 1,000 examinees each--two samples of 1,000 Anglo-American and two samples of 1,000 Native American students taking the New Mexico High School Proficiency…

The psychometric characteristics of the Graduate Record Examinations General Test (GRE-GT) were studied for three handicapped groups. Experimental subjects took the GRE-GT between October 1981 and June 1984; they include: (1) 151 visually-impaired students taking large-type, extended-time administrations; (2) 188 visually-impaired students taking…

Many researchers have suggested that the cause of differential item functioning (DIF) can in part be due to the misspecification of the supporting trait distribution (STD). This paper demonstrates how a unidimensional item response theory (IRT) calibration of response data, generated from a two-dimensional IRT model, results in DIF when the…

A method is proposed for the detection of item bias with respect to observed or unobserved subgroups. The method uses quasi-loglinear models for the incomplete subgroup x test score x item 1 x ... x item k contingency table. If the subgroup membership is unknown, the models are the incomplete-latent-class models of S. J. Haberman (1979). The…

The use of loglinear latent class models to detect item bias was studied. Purposes of the study were to: (1) develop procedures for use in assessing item bias when the grouping variable with respect to which bias occurs is not observed; (2) develop bias detection procedures that relate to a conceptually different assessed trait--a categorical…

Research has characterized Turkish culture as very authoritarian in terms of family attitudes. To determine if any of the cultural differences in authoritarian personality scores are due to differences in language or measuring instruments rather than cultural differences in personaltiy traits, university students from the United States and Turkey…

The purpose of this study was to demonstrate the use of confirmatory factor analysis to investigate the existence of item bias in an affective scale measuring self concept. The LISREL IV program was used to detect test item bias and factorial invariance. The ethnic groups compared in the study were Black, Hispanic, and White. The obtained factor…

This study was designed to increase knowledge of the functioning of item bias techniques in detecting biased items. Previous studies have used computer-generated data or real data with unknown amounts of bias. The present project extends previous studies by using items that are logically generated and subjectively evaluated a priori to be biased…

This project examined the hypothesis that different background experiences associated with cultural grouping may lead to differences in test-taking strategies which result in score differences extraneous to the abilities the test is intended to measure. Its purposes were to confirm (or disconfirm) the cultural differences hypothesis and to provide…