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University of Massachusetts Amherst

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Affects

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An Application Of Item Response Theory To Psychological Test Development, Cristian Zanon, Claudio S. Hutz, Hanwook (Henry) Yoo, Ronald K. Hambleton Jan 2016

An Application Of Item Response Theory To Psychological Test Development, Cristian Zanon, Claudio S. Hutz, Hanwook (Henry) Yoo, Ronald K. Hambleton

College of Education Faculty Publication Series

Item response theory (IRT) has become a popular methodological framework for modeling response data from assessments in education and health; however, its use is not widespread among psychologists. This paper aims to provide a didactic application of IRT and to highlight some of these advantages for psychological test development. IRT was applied to two scales (a positive and a negative affect scale) of a self-report test. Respondents were 853 university students (57 % women) between the ages of 17 and 35 and who answered the scales. IRT analyses revealed that the positive affect scale has items with moderate discrimination and …