Examining differential item functioning of social interaction and performance fears in people with hazardous alcohol consumption and probable alcohol dependence
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: A growing body of evidence has highlighted the significant relationship between social anxiety disorder and hazardous alcohol consumption, harmful use, and alcohol use disorder. This relationship may influence the reporting of fear and avoidance of social or performance situations on common self-report measures among individuals with hazardous alcohol use or dependence.Method: The current study utilized modern psychometric methods, namely Item Response Theory (IRT) and Differential Item Functioning (DIF), in an online sample of Australian adults (n = 1052) to examine the potential under- or over-reporting of items on the Social Interaction Anxiety and Social Phobia Scales (SIAS/SPS) by groups of alcohol users (as measured by the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test), while controlling for underlying levels of social anxiety severity.Results: The results indicated that there were no items on the SIAS/SPS that exhibited significant (p < 0.01) and meaningful DIF (based on an a priori cutoff of change in pseudo-R2 across nested models >0.05) attributable to either hazardous consumption or symptoms of alcohol dependence. Moreover, the combined effect of multiple items that demonstrated significant (but non-meaningful) DIF on total SIAS scores relative to scores that assume no DIF between alcohol using groups was minimal.Conclusions: This study suggests that different rates of social anxiety across levels of alcohol consumption and alcohol dependence may not be the result of a systematic under- or over-reporting of certain items on the SIAS and SPS, and as such total social anxiety scores can be compared regardless of the level of alcohol use or dependence symptoms.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".