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A Modeling Framework to Examine Psychological Processes Underlying Ordinal Responses and Response Times of Psychometric Data

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2025

Inhan Kang Open the ORCID record for Inhan Kang [Opens in a new window] ,
Dylan Molenaar  and
Roger Ratcliff
Inhan Kang*
Affiliation:
Yonsei University
Dylan Molenaar
Affiliation:
University of Amsterdam
Roger Ratcliff
Affiliation:
The Ohio State University
*
Correspondence should be made to Inhan Kang, Yonsei University, 403 Widang Hall, 50 Yonsei-ro, Seodaemun-gu, Seoul 03722, Republic of Korea. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

This article presents a joint modeling framework of ordinal responses and response times (RTs) for the measurement of latent traits. We integrate cognitive theories of decision-making and confidence judgments with psychometric theories to model individual-level measurement processes. The model development starts with the sequential sampling framework which assumes that when an item is presented, a respondent accumulates noisy evidence over time to respond to the item. Several cognitive and psychometric theories are reviewed and integrated, leading us to three psychometric process models with different representations of the cognitive processes underlying the measurement. We provide simulation studies that examine parameter recovery and show the relationships between latent variables and data distributions. We further test the proposed models with empirical data measuring three traits related to motivation. The results show that all three models provide reasonably good descriptions of observed response proportions and RT distributions. Also, different traits favor different process models, which implies that psychological measurement processes may have heterogeneous structures across traits. Our process of model building and examination illustrates how cognitive theories can be incorporated into psychometric model development to shed light on the measurement process, which has had little attention in traditional psychometric models.

Keywords

response timepsychological processmeasurementpsychometric process modelingdecision-makingconfidence judgments
Type
Theory & Methods
Information
Psychometrika , Volume 88 , Issue 3 , September 2023 , pp. 940 - 974
Copyright
Copyright © 2023 The Author(s) under exclusive licence to The Psychometric Society

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