psychsyn {careless}

Computes the psychometric synonym/antonym score

Description

Takes a matrix of item responses and identifies item pairs that are highly correlated within the overall dataset. What defines "highly correlated" is set by the critical value (e.g., r > .60). Each respondents' psychometric synonym score is then computed as the within-person correlation between the identified item-pairs. Alternatively computes the psychometric antonym score which is a variant that uses item pairs that are highly negatively correlated.

Usage

psychsyn(x, critval = 0.6, anto = FALSE, diag = FALSE, resample_na = TRUE)

Arguments

x

is a matrix of item responses

critval

is the minimum magnitude of the correlation between two items in order for them to be considered psychometric synonyms. Defaults to .60

anto

determines whether psychometric antonyms are returned instead of psychometric synonyms. Defaults to FALSE

diag

additionally return the number of item pairs available for each observation. Useful if dataset contains many missing values.

resample_na

if psychsyn returns NA for a respondent resample to attempt getting a non-NA result.

Author(s)

Richard Yentes [e-mail], Francisco Wilhelm [e-mail]

References

Meade, A. W., & Craig, S. B. (2012). Identifying careless responses in survey data. Psychological Methods, 17(3), 437-455. doi:10.1037/a0028085

See Also

psychant for a more concise way to calculate the psychometric antonym score, psychsyn_critval for a helper that allows to set an adequate critical value for the size of the correlation.

Examples

synonyms <- psychsyn(careless_dataset, .60)
antonyms <- psychsyn(careless_dataset2, .50, anto = TRUE)
antonyms <- psychant(careless_dataset2, .50)

#with diagnostics
synonyms <- psychsyn(careless_dataset, .60, diag = TRUE)
antonyms <- psychant(careless_dataset2, .50, diag = TRUE)