Test Construction Strategy
Test construction strategies are the various ways that items in a psychological measure are created and decided upon. They are most often associated with personality tests but can also be applied to other psychological constructs such as mood or psychopathology. There are three commonly used general strategies: inductive, deductive, and empirical. Scales created today will often incorporate elements of all three methods. Inductive Also known as itemetric or internal consistency methods, the inductive method begins by constructing a wide variety of items with little or no relation to an established theory or previous measure. The group of items is then answered by a large number of participants and analyzed using various statistical methods, such as exploratory factor analysis or principal component analysis. These methods allow researchers to analyze natural relationships among the questions and then label components of the scale based on how the questions group together. The Fi ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Personality Tests
A personality test is a method of assessing human personality constructs. Most personality assessment instruments (despite being loosely referred to as "personality tests") are in fact introspective (i.e., subjective) self-report questionnaire (Q-data, in terms of LOTS data) measures or reports from life records (L-data) such as rating scales. Attempts to construct actual performance tests of personality have been very limited even though Raymond Cattell with his colleague Frank Warburton compiled a list of over 2000 separate objective tests that could be used in constructing objective personality tests. One exception however, was the Objective-Analytic Test Battery, a performance test designed to quantitatively measure 10 factor-analytically discerned personality trait dimensions. A major problem with both L-data and Q-data methods is that because of item transparency, rating scales and self-report questionnaires are highly susceptible to motivational and response distortion ran ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Psychopathology
Psychopathology is the study of abnormal cognition, behaviour, and experiences which differs according to social norms and rests upon a number of constructs that are deemed to be the social norm at any particular era. Biological psychopathology is the study of the biological etiology of abnormal cognitions, behaviour and experiences. Child psychopathology is a specialisation applied to children and adolescents. Animal psychopathology is a specialisation applied to non-human animals. This concept is linked to the philosophical ideas first outlined by Galton (1869) and is linked to the appliance of eugenical ideations around what constitutes the human. History Early explanations for mental illnesses were influenced by religious belief and superstition. Psychological conditions that are now classified as mental disorders were initially attributed to possessions by evil spirits, demons, and the devil. This idea was widely accepted up until the sixteenth and seventeenth centur ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Exploratory Factor Analysis
In multivariate statistics, exploratory factor analysis (EFA) is a statistical method used to uncover the underlying structure of a relatively large set of variables. EFA is a technique within factor analysis whose overarching goal is to identify the underlying relationships between measured variables. It is commonly used by researchers when developing a scale (a ''scale'' is a collection of questions used to measure a particular research topic) and serves to identify a set of latent constructs underlying a battery of measured variables. It should be used when the researcher has no ''a priori'' hypothesis about factors or patterns of measured variables. ''Measured variables'' are any one of several attributes of people that may be observed and measured. Examples of measured variables could be the physical height, weight, and pulse rate of a human being. Usually, researchers would have a large number of measured variables, which are assumed to be related to a smaller number of "un ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Principal Component Analysis
Principal component analysis (PCA) is a popular technique for analyzing large datasets containing a high number of dimensions/features per observation, increasing the interpretability of data while preserving the maximum amount of information, and enabling the visualization of multidimensional data. Formally, PCA is a statistical technique for reducing the dimensionality of a dataset. This is accomplished by linearly transforming the data into a new coordinate system where (most of) the variation in the data can be described with fewer dimensions than the initial data. Many studies use the first two principal components in order to plot the data in two dimensions and to visually identify clusters of closely related data points. Principal component analysis has applications in many fields such as population genetics, microbiome studies, and atmospheric science. The principal components of a collection of points in a real coordinate space are a sequence of p unit vectors, where the ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Five Factor Model
The Big Five personality traits is a suggested taxonomy, or grouping, for personality traits, developed from the 1980s onward in psychological trait theory. Starting in the 1990s, the theory identified five factors by labels, for the US English speaking population, typically referred to as: * openness to experience (inventive/curious vs. consistent/cautious) *conscientiousness (efficient/organized vs. extravagant/careless) *extraversion (outgoing/energetic vs. solitary/reserved) * agreeableness (friendly/compassionate vs. critical/rational) * neuroticism (sensitive/nervous vs. resilient/confident) When factor analysis (a statistical technique) is applied to personality survey data, it reveals semantic associations: some words used to describe aspects of personality are often applied to the same person. For example, someone described as conscientious is more likely to be described as "always prepared" rather than "messy". These associations suggest five broad dimensions used in ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory
The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) is a standardized psychometric test of adult personality and psychopathology. Psychologists and other mental health professionals use various versions of the MMPI to help develop treatment plans, assist with differential diagnosis, help answer legal questions (forensic psychology), screen job candidates during the personnel selection process, or as part of a therapeutic assessment procedure. The original MMPI was developed by Starke R. Hathaway and J. C. McKinley, faculty of the University of Minnesota, and first published by the University of Minnesota Press in 1943. It was replaced by an updated version, the MMPI-2, in 1989 (Butcher, Dahlstrom, Graham, Tellegen, and Kaemmer). A version for adolescents, the MMPI-A, was published in 1992. An alternative version of the test, the MMPI-2 Restructured Form (MMPI-2-RF), published in 2008, retains some aspects of the traditional MMPI assessment strategy, but adopts a different ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |