The "Difficulty" of a Personality Inventory Item

Hanley, Charles

doi:10.1177/001316446202200316

Cited by 26 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…Items were carefully selected on the basis of their intermediate endorsement frequencies, low correlations with desirability, and moderate content saturations as reflected in moderate (yet definite) biserial correlations with their respective total scales. All three of these characteristics have been shown to maximize the acquiescence-eliciting potential of items (Hanley, 1962;Jackson and Lay, 1968;Jackson and Messick, 1961;Trott and Jackson, 1967;Wiggins, 1962).…”

Section: Experimental Measuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Analysis of Two Response Styles: True Responding and Item Endorsement 1

Morf

Jackson

1972

Educational and Psychological Measurement

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Section: Experimental Measuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Analysis of Two Response Styles: True Responding and Item Endorsement 1

Morf

Jackson

1972

Educational and Psychological Measurement

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Section: Difficulty and Other Correlates Of Criticalness Response Stymentioning

confidence: 84%

“…than easy-to-read attitude items, but fewer agree and fewer socially desirable responses were made to hard-than easy-to-read personality items. In another study (Hanley, 1962), the reliability of the number ofr esponses was generally higher for long MMPI items than short ones.The other major group of relevant studies concern two other response styles on achievement or aptitude tests and examine the relationship between the subjects' performance on such a test and their tendency to make stylistic responses on the same test. These studies are analogous in their approach to the previous studies that compare tests or items of varying -3-difficulty, for a test, by definition, is more difficult for those who perform poorly on it than for those who perform ,.,rell.…”

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confidence: 84%

Difficulty and Other Correlates of Criticalness Response Style at the Item Level1

Stricker¹

1964

ETS Research Bulletin Series

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This study examined the.relationship between the difficulty of items on an achievement-type test of report writing and (a) the items' correlations with the test's criticalness response style score, and (b) the items' correlations with the test's content score. Item readability and item format variables were also analyzed. The major findings were that (a) the items' difficulty was related to their correlations with the content score and unrelated to the items' correlations with the response style score; (b) the items' location in the test was generally related to their correlations with the response style score, and unrelated to the other variables; and (c) the readability indexes were not related to the three basic item variables. DIFFICULTY AND OTHER CORRELATES OF CRITICALNESS RESPONSE STYLE AT THE ITEM LEVEL 1Largely as a result of Cronbach's (1946; reviews of the early literature on response sets--or response styles--on tests, the view is widely held that tests and test items that are difficult or ambiguous are most affected by those response styles, such as acquiescence, evasiveness, and extremeness, that are linked to the response format.Despite the prevalence of this view, the results of relevant studies are not altogether convincing, and are largely limited to two response styles--acquiescence, and the position of the chosen alternative on multiple-choice tests.One major group of relevant studies examined acquiescence on tests or items of varying difficulty or ambiguity. Only one of the studies (Gage, Leavitt, & Stone, 1957) concerns the difficulty issue. In a comparison of difficult and easy general information items, the reliability of the number of true responses was .68 for the 50 difficult items, and .09 for the 40 easy ones. The two kinds of items, however, did not represent exactly the same content areas.The other studies of this kind concern various facets of item ambiguity. Two of these studies directly concern ambiguity. In one study (Bass, 1955), the original and reversed version of the California F scale items that were rated most opposite in meaning (and, hence, assumed to be clear in meaning) appeared to measure content (i.e., the correlation between the two items was relatively high and in the content direction), while those rated less opposite in meaning (and, hence, assumed to be -2-relatively ambiguous in meaning) did not, evidently because of the operation of acquiescence on the latter items. Moreover, an analysis of variance found significantly (£ < .01) greater acquiescence to the pairs of items that were least opposite in meaning. The assumption in this study that the rated level of opposition measures ambiguity is questionable, for it is possible for a pair of items that are rated as similar in meaning to be very upambiguous. In a second study (l3a.nta, 1961), the number of agree responses on attitude scales increased and the number of extreme responses decreased with the ambiguity of the scales' referents. The referents were "President Eisenhower," "College Fraternities,"...

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“…Proposed indices of item ambiguity have included direct Likert ratings (Johnson, 1986a), response inconsistency (Benton, 1935), balanced endorsement frequency (Fricke, 1957;Hanley, 1962), an "ambiguity Goldberg, 1963) combining inconsistency and endorsement frequency, and the number of responses left blank (Goldberg, 1968). The present study employed all of these indices except blank responses, which showed an extremely skewed distribution and zero reliability in these samples.…”

Section: Itemmetric Characteristics Used As Predictor Variablesmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…Fricke (1957) and Hanley (1962) argued that the tendency toward balanced endorsement frequency represents random responding to ambiguous items. The tendency toward balanced endorsement frequency correlates highly with response inconsistency (Goldberg, 1963).…”

Section: Itemmetric Characteristics Used As Predictor Variablesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Impact of Item Characteristics on Item and Scale Validity

Johnson¹

2004

Multivariate Behavioral Research

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This study describes the relation between personality items' validities, defined as the items' correlations with acquaintance ratings on the Big 5 personality factors, and other itemmetric properties including ambiguity, syntactic complexity, social desirability, content, and trait indicativity. Five external validity coefficients for each item on the California Psychological Inventory were correlated with a number of itemmetric variables often assumed to affect item validity. Item validity correlated positively with social desirability and trait indicativity and negatively with ambiguity across the five factors. Other characteristics had a more limited influence on item validity. Multiple regression analyses revealed trait indicativity -how obviously an item response indicates a trait -to be the most important determinant of item validity. Scales built from itemmetrically sound versus poor items showed differential validity in two additional samples. Implications for the psychological processes underlying responses to personality items are discussed.

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The "Difficulty" of a Personality Inventory Item

Cited by 26 publications

References 5 publications

An Analysis of Two Response Styles: True Responding and Item Endorsement 1

An Analysis of Two Response Styles: True Responding and Item Endorsement 1

Difficulty and Other Correlates of Criticalness Response Style at the Item Level1

The Impact of Item Characteristics on Item and Scale Validity

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