The consequences of pairing questions: context effects in personality measurement.
The effect of context on responses to questions has been a prominent focus in social and political survey research. However, little investigation of context effects has been done for the measurement of psychological constructs. A measure of anger experience and expression in development uses vignettes describing interpersonal situations that provoke varying degrees of anger and require respondents to indicate their affective and/or expressive response to the situation. In this study, the consequences of pairing the two questions for each vignette are investigated. Pairing the anger-experience and likelihood-of-expression questions changes the item's context. Item response theory analysis similar to that used to detect differential item functioning was performed. For some of the items, responding to a single or paired question affected the extremity of responses. The findings are discussed in terms of their implications for personality measurement.
Steinberg
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Department of Psychology, Portland State University, Oregon 97207, USA. steinbergl@pdx.edu
D000328:Adult; D000786:Anger; D019260:Expressed Emotion; D005163:Factor Analysis, Statistical; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D016013:Likelihood Functions; D008297:Male; D010555:Personality Inventory / Q000592:standards*; D011594:Psychometrics; D015203:Reproducibility of Results