Objective: The goal was to examine, in an all female sample, possible mechanisms for the relationship between a history of childhood sexual abuse and the likelihood of perpetrating sexual abuse as an adult. It was hypothesized that Borderline and Antisocial Personality Disorder tendencies would mediate the relationship between these two forms of…

Bilingualism (Sanz, 2000), motivation (Pintrich, 1989), and language aptitude (Grigorenko, Sternberg, and Ehrman, 2000) are crucial individual differences that contribute to successful adult language learning. Since Gardner's (1985) seminal work on motivation, many studies have shown that motivation is dynamic and that it affects language…

A study investigated the vocal intensity of interviewers and the gender of interviewees to test a speech accommodation theory of behavioral reactions to speech style, while simultaneously determining whether previous research is corroborated in the context of the employment interview. Multiple discriminant analysis of 34 interviews (13 males and…

Three methods of transforming unordered categorical response variables are described. One is a method using dummy binary variables. The second method analyzes all categorical variables simultaneously and is based on an eigenanalysis of frequency patterns scaled relative to within-groups variance, jointly developed by J. E. Overall and J. A.…

This study tests the hypothesis that resistance to interference as measured by Stroop Color and Word Test is related to psychopathology. College student subjects were classified into three groups on the basis of their Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) profile high points. Subjects' cognitive interference scores significantly…

Generalizability or invariance procedures have been known for over three decades. Through the years, these procedures have not been widely discussed or employed. One reason for the lack of use is that most of the articles on invariance procedures have been mathematically oriented. The mathematical orientation of research articles and the lack of…

Predictive discriminant analysis involves a technique used in multivariate classification, i.e., in predicting membership in well-defined groups for units on which multiple measures are available. The validation (assessment) of group membership predictions pertains to two problems: estimating true proportions of correct classifications (i.e., hit…

"Classification: Purposes, Principles, Progress, Prospects" by Robert R. Sokal is reprinted in this document. It summarizes the principles of classification and cluster analysis in a manner which is of specific value to the Marine Corps Office of Manpower Utilization. Following the article is a 184 item bibliography on cluster analysis…

The Kvaraceus Delinquency Proneness Scale (KD Scale) was developed as an instrument designed to aid in prediction of future juvenile delinquents. The purpose of this research was to evaluate the predictive validity of the instrument over a 5-year period. Indexes of delinquency adjustment and academic achievement served as the validational…

An aspect of construct validity of the six scales of the Career Maturity Inventory was investigated with 127 ninth-grade students. The scales were found to be more highly intercorrelated than is desirable. Coupled with their modest reliabilities, this outcome was interpreted as a major limitation of the instrument. (Author)

Confirmatory factor analysis was applied to test second- and higher-order factor models in the areas of structure of abilities, allometry, and the separation of specific and error variance estimates. The estimation of validity and reliability, second-order models within factor analysis models, and the concept of discriminability were also studied.…

Study examined the effects of the variables of list length and pronunciation instructions on performance in the verbal discrimination and two category classification tasks and found that the effects of these variables on the two tasks were quite comparable. (Author)

Purpose of the investigation was to identify the underlying content and cognitive dimensions in a standardized achievement test in the area of life and health insurance. (Author)

Despite the numerous individual illustrations in the literature showing how the discrimination index may be used to identify items with faults, its overall effectiveness as a measure of item quality, defined in terms of the presence or absence of faults, is not clear. This study investigates its validity. (Author/RK)