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21 - Advanced Psychometrics

from Part IV - Understanding What Your Data Are Telling You About Psychological Processes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 December 2024

By
Patrick E. Shrout  and
Mao Mogami
Edited by
Harry T. Reis ,
Tessa West  and
Charles M. Judd
Harry T. Reis
Affiliation:
University of Rochester, New York
Tessa West
Affiliation:
New York University
Charles M. Judd
Affiliation:
University of Colorado Boulder
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Summary

In this chapter we review advanced psychometric methods for examining the validity of self-report measures of attitudes, beliefs, personality style, and other social psychological and personality constructs that rely on introspection. The methods include confirmatory-factor analysis to examine whether measurements can be interpreted as meaningful continua, and measurement invariance analysis to examine whether items are answered the same way in different groups of people. We illustrate the methods using a measure of individual differences in openness to political pluralism, which includes four conceptual facets. To understand how the facets relate to the overall dimension of openness to political pluralism, we compare a second-order factor model and a bifactor model. We also check to see whether the psychometric patterns of item responses are the same for males and females. These psychometric methods can both document the quality of obtained measurements and inform theorists about nuances of their constructs.

Keywords

measurementpsychometricsconstruct validitymeasurement invariancesecond-order factor modelbifactor modelpolitical pluralism
Type
Chapter
Information
Handbook of Research Methods in Social and Personality Psychology , pp. 502 - 531
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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