GENERALIZABILITY OF STRATIFIED-PARALLEL TESTS

One of the major concerns of reliability theory has been the estimation of the reliability of a composite measure from the degree of agreement among its component parts. In the classical theory, formulas were developed under the assumption that the parts are strictly equivalent. It was later shown t...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Psychometrika 1965-03, Vol.30 (1), p.39-56
Main Authors: RAJARATNAM, N, CRONBACH, L J, GLESER, G C
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Humans
Mathematics
Models, Theoretical
Old Medline
Psychometrics
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Summary:One of the major concerns of reliability theory has been the estimation of the reliability of a composite measure from the degree of agreement among its component parts. In the classical theory, formulas were developed under the assumption that the parts are strictly equivalent. It was later shown that the same formulas follow from various sets of weaker assumptions which require the composites to be strictly equivalent and require the parts to have a certain homogeneity of statistical properties, but not necessarily to be equivalent. An alternative model which has received increasing attention in recent years regards a given measure as a random sample from a universe of measures whose homogeneity or equivalence is not specified a priori, and a composite test as a random sample of items from a universe of not-necessarily-equivalent items. This too permits an internal-consistency estimate of reliability. Both the equivalent-composites model and the randomsampling model appear to be unduly restrictive and unrealistic; we propose here to develop the implications of a third model in which a test is considered to have been formed by stratified sampling of items.
ISSN:0033-3123
1860-0980
DOI:10.1007/bf02289746