Today, forced choice testing is perhaps the most widely explored approach to dealing with faking and other forms of response distortion in applied settings. This is due largely to advances in test construction and scoring over the last 15 years which have made it possible to obtain normative information from forced choice tests via classical test theory (CTT) (White & Young, 1998) and item response theory (IRT) methods (Brown & Maydeu-Olivares, 2011; de la Torre, Ponsoda, Leenen, & Hontangas, 2011; Stark, Chernyshenko, & Drasgow, 2005). For personality testing, in particular, multidimensional forced choice (MFC) applications are rapidly expanding. Our presentation will describe four MFC modeling approaches and research comparing convergent and criterion validities for MFC and Likert-type Big Five personality measures administered in Korea. The MFC Big Five measure was scored four ways: (1) a partially ipsative approach based on CTT (White & Young, 1998); (2) an analogous partially ipsative approach using an IRT graded response model (3) the Thurstonian MFC IRT approach (Brown & Maydeu-Olivares, 2011); and (4) the GGUM-RANK MFC IRT scoring approach (Authors, 2015). We found that all IRT-based scoring methods showed expected patterns of correlation with Likert-type measures, thus supporting the viability of these recently developed approaches. However, the much simpler CTT scoring method was also quite effective and may be adequate for many organizational and educational applications. In our presentation, we will elaborate on these issues and provide suggestions for future research.

References

Authors (2015). Paper title.

Brown, A., & Maydeu-Olivares, A. (2011). Item response modeling of forced-choice questionnaires. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 71, 460–502.

de la Torre, J., Ponsoda, V., Leenen, I., & Hontangas, P. (2012, April). Examining the viability of recent models for forced-choice data. Presented at the Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Stark, S., Chernyshenko, O. S., & Drasgow, F. (2005). An IRT approach to constructing and scoring pairwise preference items involving stimuli on different dimensions: The multiunidimensional pairwise preference model. Applied Psychological Measurement, 29, 184 –201.

White, L. A., & Young, M. C. (1998, August). Development and validation of the Assessment of Individual Motivation (AIM). Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association, San Francisco, CA.