Improving the Factor Structure of Psychological Scales
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Many psychological scales written in the Likert format include reverse worded (RW) items in order to control acquiescence bias. However, studies have shown that RW items often contaminate the factor structure of the scale by creating one or more method factors. The present study examines an alternative scale format, called the Expanded format, which replaces each response option in the Likert scale with a full sentence. We hypothesized that this format would result in a cleaner factor structure as compared with the Likert format. We tested this hypothesis on three popular psychological scales: the Rosenberg Self-Esteem scale, the Conscientiousness subscale of the Big Five Inventory, and the Beck Depression Inventory II. Scales in both formats showed comparable reliabilities. However, scales in the Expanded format had better (i.e., lower and more theoretically defensible) dimensionalities than scales in the Likert format, as assessed by both exploratory factor analyses and confirmatory factor analyses. We encourage further study and wider use of the Expanded format, particularly when a scale's dimensionality is of theoretical interest.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it