TSSA {SSRA}

Takeya Semantic Structure Analysis

Description

This function conducts Takeya Semantic Structure Analysis (TSSA) for polytomous items based on Takeya 1991.

Usage

TSSA(dat, m, crit = 0.93, pairwise = TRUE, sig = FALSE, exact = TRUE, alpha = 0.05,
  p.adjust.method = c("holm", "hochberg", "hommel",
                      "bonferroni", "BH", "BY", "fdr", "none"),
  digits = 3, vnames = TRUE, order = c("no", "decreasing", "increasing"),
  exclude = TRUE, output = TRUE)

Arguments

dat

requires a data frame with polytomous data, all items need to have the same numbers of response categories

m

requires the number of item response categories

crit

criteria for ordering coefficient

pairwise

pairwise deletion of missing data, if pairwise = FALSE listwise deletion if applied

sig

if sig = TRUE, ordering will be assesed according to ordering coefficient and statistical significance

exact

if exact = TRUE, exact binomial test will be applied otherwise single-sample proportion test will be applied

alpha

significance level

p.adjust.method

p-value correction method for multiple comparisons, see: ?p.adjust (default = holm)

digits

integer indicating the number of decimal places to be used

vnames

use variable names for labeling?

order

sort by item mean of j and k?

exclude

exclude paths with no relationship?

output

print result table?

Details

In Takeya Semantic Structure Analysis (TSSA), a pair of items (e.g., Item1 and Item2) is judged 'sequential', if exceptional answer patterns are less than a defined criterion. If we suppose Item1 to be the item with higher item mean than Item2 (i.e., 'Item1 -> Item2' in the treegram), 'exceptional answer patter' means that somone gets a lower score on Item1 and a higher score on Item2. If this kind of sequential relation is bi-directional (i.e., not only 'Item1 -> Item2' but also 'Item2 -> Item1'), the relation of the two items is judged 'equal'.

Value

Returns an object of class tssa, to be used for the seqtable function. The object is a list with following entries: 'dat' (data frame), 'call" (function call), 'args' (specification of arguments), 'time' (time of analysis), 'R' (R version), 'package' (package version), and 'restab' (result table). The 'restab' entry has following entries:

j	item j
k	item k
n	sample size
j.mean	mean of item j
j.sd	standard devication of item j
k.mean	mean of item k
k.sd	standard devication of item k
c.jk	ordering coefficient j -> k
p.jk	p-value j -> k (available if sig = TRUE)
sig.jk	statistical significane p-value j -> k (0 = no / 1 = yes; available if sig = TRUE)
c.kj	ordering coefficient k -> j
p.kj	p-value k -> j (0 = no / 1 = yes; available if sig = TRUE)
sig.kj	statistical significane p-value k -> j (available if sig = TRUE)
crt.jk	ordering j -> k
crt.kj	ordering k -> j
order	order structure of item pairs ("=", "+","-")

Author(s)

Takuya Yanagida [e-mail] Keiko Sakai [e-mail]

References

Takeya, M. (1991). A new test theory: Structural analyses for educational information. Tokyo: Waseda University Press.

See Also

SSRA, seqtable, scatterplot

Examples

# Example data based on Takeya (1991)

# Takeya Semantic Structure Analysis
# ordering assesed according to the ordering coefficient
TSSA(exdat, m = 5)

# Takeya Semantic Structure Analysis including statistical testing
# ordering assesed according to the ordering coefficient and statistical significance
TSSA(exdat, m = 5, sig = TRUE)