Questionnaires in educational research assessing students' attitudes and beliefs are low-stakes for the students. As a consequence, students might not always consistently respond to a questionnaire scale but instead provide more random response patterns with no clear link to items' contents. We study inter-individual differences in students'…

The measurement of political solidarities and related concepts is an important endeavor in numerous scientific disciplines, such as political and social science research. European surveys, such as the Eurobarometer, frequently measure these concepts for people's home country and Europe raising questions with respect to the order of precedence.…

When researching socioscientific topics, particularly on the Internet, readers face multiple texts that they must integrate into a coherent mental model. Previous research in monolingual settings has found that comprehension is biased toward readers' prior beliefs (text-belief consistency effect). Considering that the Internet is multilingual,…

Careless responding is a pervasive concern in research using affective surveys. Although researchers have considered various methods for identifying careless responses, studies are limited that consider the utility of these methods in the context of computer adaptive testing (CAT) for affective scales. Using a simulation study informed by recent…

Measurement invariance (MI) is required for validly comparing latent constructs measured by multiple ordinal self-report items. Non-invariances may occur when disregarding (group differences in) an acquiescence response style (ARS; an agreeing tendency regardless of item content). If non-invariance results solely from neglecting ARS, one should…

This study evaluated differential item functioning (DIF) in achievement motivation items before and after using anchoring vignettes as a statistical tool to account for group differences in response styles across gender and ethnicity. We applied the nonparametric scoring of the vignettes to motivation items from the 2015 Programme for…

Item response tree (IRTree) models are a flexible framework to control self-reported trait measurements for response styles. To this end, IRTree models decompose the responses to rating items into sub-decisions, which are assumed to be made on the basis of either the trait being measured or a response style, whereby the effects of such person…

A test battery with two different levels of adaptation is presented: a within-subtest level for the selection of the items in the subtests and a between-subtest level to move from one subtest to the next. The battery runs on a two-level model consisting of a regular response model for each of the subtests extended with a second level for the joint…

Questionnaires are by far the most common tool for measuring noncognitive constructs in psychology and educational sciences. Response bias may pose an additional source of variation between respondents that threatens validity of conclusions drawn from questionnaire data. We present a mixture modeling approach that leverages response time data from…

Careless and insufficient effort responding (C/IER) is a situation where participants respond to survey instruments without considering the item content. This phenomena adds noise to data leading to erroneous inference. There are multiple approaches to identifying and accounting for C/IER in survey settings, of these approaches the best performing…

Unfolding item response theory (IRT) models are important alternatives to dominance IRT models in describing the response processes on self-report tests. Their usage is common in personality measures, since they indicate potential differentiations in test score interpretation. This paper aims to gain a better insight into the structure of trait…

Randomized response techniques (RRTs) are applied to reduce response biases in self-report surveys on sensitive research questions (e.g., on socially undesirable characteristics). However, there is evidence that they cannot completely eliminate self-protecting response strategies. To address this problem, there are RRTs specifically designed to…

Response style, one common aberrancy in non-cognitive assessments in psychological fields, is problematic in terms of inaccurate estimation of item and person parameters, which leads to serious reliability, validity, and fairness issues (Baumgartner & Steenkamp, 2001; Bolt & Johnson, 2009; Bolt & Newton, 2011). Response style refers to…

In undergraduate research settings, students are likely to encounter anomalous data, that is, data that do not meet their expectations. Most of the research that directly or indirectly captures the role of anomalous data in research settings uses post-hoc reflective interviews or surveys. These data collection approaches focus on recall of past…

Curriculum-based measures (CBMs) such as Word Identification Fluency promote student achievement, but because they are timed and administered frequently, they are prone to variation in student response styles. To study the impact of WIF response styles, we created and examined the validity of a novel response style measure and examined the degree…