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Contextual Responses to Affirmative and/or Reversed-Worded Items

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2025

Ulf Böckenholt
Ulf Böckenholt*
Affiliation:
Northwestern University, Kellogg School of Management
*
Correspondence should be made to Ulf Böckenholt, Northwestern University, Kellogg School of Management, 2211 Campus Drive, Evanston, IL 60208, USA. Email:u-bockenholt@northwestern.kellogg.edu
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Abstract

This paper presents a systematic investigation of how affirmative and polar-opposite items presented either jointly or separately affect yea-saying tendencies. We measure these yea-saying tendencies with item response models that estimate a respondent’s tendency to give a “yea”-response that may be unrelated to the target trait. In a re-analysis of the Zhang et al. (PLoS ONE, 11:1–15, 2016) data, we find that yea-saying tendencies depend on whether items are presented as part of a scale that contains affirmative and/or polar-opposite items. Yea-saying tendencies are stronger for affirmative than for polar-opposite items. Moreover, presenting polar-opposite items together with affirmative items creates lower yea-saying tendencies for polar-opposite items than when presented in isolation. IRT models that do not account for these yea-saying effects arrive at a two-dimensional representation of the target trait. These findings demonstrate that the contextual information provided by an item scale can serve as a determinant of differential item functioning.

Keywords

affirmative and polar-opposite itemsyea-sayingacquiescenceresponse stylesdifferential item functioningability-based guessing model
Type
Original Paper
Information
Psychometrika , Volume 84 , Issue 4 , December 2019 , pp. 986 - 999
Copyright
Copyright © 2019 The Psychometric Society

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