Anastasi Lecture 2017

Fritz Drasgow 
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 

Tuesday, 10 October 2017 | 5:30 p.m.
12th-floor Lounge | E. Gerald Corrigan Conference Center | Lowenstein Center | Fordham University Lincoln Center Campus | 30 West 60th Street | New York, NY 10023

This lecture is open to the public. A reception will follow. 

The Likert rating scale dates back to a 1932 paper by Rensis Likert; it has been a mainstay of psychology for many decades. However, problems with Likert scaling abound. Individual differences in response biases, cultural differences in rating scale styles, and measurement model misspecification all have the potential to invalidate results.

Forced choice methods, where the rater simply chooses which of two or more statements is "more like me," offer hope for addressing these problems. Drasgow will discuss these methods and suggest that to solve the ipsativity problem of traditional scoring of forced choice instruments, an item response theory model, such as the Multi-Unidimensional Pairwise Preference Model, should be used. He will also describe some findings from military samples.

Fritz Drasgow, Ph.D., is currently the dean of the School of Labor & Employment Relations at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is also a professor at the university with a joint appointment in psychology and the School of Labor & Employment Relations. Drasgow's research focuses on psychological measurement and the application of quantitative methods to important practical problems. His recent work focuses on psychometric theory for personality assessment.