Contamination of responses due to extreme and midpoint response style can confound the interpretation of scores, threatening the validity of inferences made from survey responses. This study incorporated person-level covariates in the multidimensional item response tree model to explain heterogeneity in response style. We include an empirical…

Analysts of discrete data often face the challenge of managing the tendency of inflation on certain values. When treated improperly, such phenomenon may lead to biased estimates and incorrect inferences. This study extends the existing literature on single-value inflated models and develops a general framework to handle variables with more than…

In psychological and survey research, the prevalence and serious consequences of careless responses from unmotivated participants are well known. In this study, we propose to iteratively detect careless responders and cleanse the data by removing their responses. The careless responders are detected using person-fit statistics. In two simulation…

Fraction of missing information [lambda][subscript j] is a useful measure of the impact of missing data on the quality of estimation of a particular parameter. This measure can be computed for all parameters in the model, and it communicates the relative loss of efficiency in the estimation of a particular parameter due to missing data. It has…

Although prediction of class membership from observed variables in latent class analysis is well understood, predicting an observed distal outcome from latent class membership is more complicated. A flexible model-based approach is proposed to empirically derive and summarize the class-dependent density functions of distal outcomes with…