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Acquiescent Responding in Balanced Multidimensional Scales and Exploratory Factor Analysis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2025

Urbano Lorenzo-Seva  and
Antoni Rodríguez-Fornells
Urbano Lorenzo-Seva*
Affiliation:
Rovira I Virgili University
Antoni Rodríguez-Fornells
Affiliation:
Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats and University of Barcelona
*
Requests for reprints should be sent to Urbano Lorenzo-Seva, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Facultat de Psicologia, Ctra. de Valls s/n, 43007 Tarragona, Spain. E-mail: uls@urv.net
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Abstract

Personality tests often consist of a set of dichotomous or Likert items. These response formats are known to be susceptible to an agreeing-response bias called acquiescence. The common assumption in balanced scales is that the sum of appropriately reversed responses should be reasonably free of acquiescence. However, inter-item correlation (or covariance) matrices can still be affected by the presence of variance due to acquiescence. To analyse these correlation matrices, we propose a method that is based on an unrestricted factor analysis and can be applied to multidimensional scales. This method obtains a factor solution in which acquiescence response variance is isolated in an independent factor. It is therefore possible, without the potentially confounding effect of acquiescence, to: (a) examine the dominant factors related to content latent variables; and (b) estimate participants–factor scores on content latent variables. This method, which is illustrated by two empirical data examples, has proved to be useful for improving the simplicity of the factor structure.

Keywords

Acquiescencebalanced scalesexploratory factor analysisfactor simplicity
Type
Original Paper
Information
Psychometrika , Volume 71 , Issue 4 , December 2006 , pp. 769 - 777
Copyright
Copyright © 2007 The Psychometric Society

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Footnotes

This research was partially supported by a grant from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology (SEJ2005-09170-C04-04/PSIC), and a grant from the Catalan Ministry of Universities, the Research and Information Society (2005SGR00017). The authors are obliged to the team of reviewers for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

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