Purpose: The purpose of this study was to enhance adherence among older (aged 55 years and older) African American men enrolled in a cancer screening trial for prostate, lung, and colorectal cancer. For this study, we defined "adherence" as completing the trial screenings. Design and Methods: We used a randomized trial design. Case managers…

Communication between children and parents has been the subject of several studies, examining the effects of, for example, disclosure and secrecy on adolescents' social relationships and adjustment. Less attention has paid to adolescent deception. We developed and tested a new instrument on lying behavior in a sample of 671 parent-adolescent…

The authors describe 2 efficiency (planned missing data) designs for measurement: the 3-form design and the 2-method measurement design. The 3-form design, a kind of matrix sampling, allows researchers to leverage limited resources to collect data for 33% more survey questions than can be answered by any 1 respondent. Power tables for estimating…

The function of Mantel-Haenszel (MH) and logistic regression (LR) statistics with real data in detecting gender-based differentially functioning items (DIF) was investigated when sample size and criterion variable varied. The data base consisted of the item responses of a population of 183,356 Caucasians to the Math test of the ACT Assessment…

The Test of Pragmatic Language (TOPL) is an individually administered instrument designed to assess pragmatic language skills that can be used with students in kindergarten through high school. It is more specifically intended for use with children, adolescents, and adults with learning disabilities, language delays, reading difficulties, or…

Recent changes in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) that lead to its division into a trend assessment and a main assessment jeopardize the information the NAEP can provide about trends, especially the trends for racial and ethnic groups. This study for the Technical Review Panel addressed whether the trend assessment provides…

The relationship between levels of reliability and the power of two bias and differential item functioning (DIF) detection methods is examined. Both methods, the Mantel-Haenszel (MH) procedure of P. W. Holland and D. T. Thayer (1988) and the Simultaneous Item Bias (SIB) procedure of R. Shealy and W. Stout (1991), use examinees' raw scores as a…

The following seven statistical procedures are compared in terms of the ability to recover a unidimensional latent trait from Likert-type data: (1) factor analysis based on Pearson correlations (FA-PR); (2) factor analysis based on polychoric correlations (FA-PL); (3) the graded response model in item response theory (IRT-GRM); (4) internal…

Detection of differential item functioning (DIF) is most often done between two groups of examinees under item response theory. It is sometimes important, however, to determine whether DIF is present in more than two groups. A method is presented for the detection of DIF in multiple groups. The method, the Q(sub j) statistic, is closely related to…

A Monte Carlo study was conducted to estimate the small sample standard errors and statistical bias of psychometric statistics commonly used in the analysis of achievement tests. The statistics examined in this research were: (1) the index of item difficulty; (2) the index of item discrimination; (3) the corrected item-total point-biserial…

Hierarchical Bayes procedures were compared for estimating item and ability parameters in item response theory. Simulated data sets from the two-parameter logistic model were analyzed using three different hierarchical Bayes procedures: (1) the joint Bayesian with known hyperparameters (JB1); (2) the joint Bayesian with information hyperpriors…

The validity of the analysis of variance (ANOVA) of a split plot factorial design was investigated using a complex interaction contrast with matched two-group ability data for detecting biased items. The definition of a biased item by this method is: an item is biased if there is an item-by-group interaction when there is no group difference in…

Three strategies for augmenting the interpretation of significance test results are illustrated. Determining the most suitable indices to use in evaluating empirical results is a matter of considerable debate among researchers. Researchers increasingly recognize that significance tests are very limited in their potential to inform the…

The purpose of this research was to reinvestigate the accuracy of three item bias detection procedures: (1) Linn and Harnisch's pseudo-IRT(Z) method; (2) Camilli's chi-square technique; and (3) Angoff's revised transformed item difficulty method. These methods are applied when the minority group sample size is too small to obtain stable estimates…

Methods for examining the viability of assumptions underlying generalized linear models are considered. By appealing to the likelihood, a natural generalization of the raw residual plot for normal theory models is derived and is applied to investigating potential misspecification of the linear predictor. A smooth version of the plot is also…