Mokken scale analysis is a popular method to evaluate the psychometric quality of clinical and personality questionnaires and their individual items. Although many empirical papers report on the extent to which sets of items form Mokken scales, there is less attention for the effect of violations of commonly used rules of thumb. In this study, the authors investigated the practical consequences of retaining or removing items with psychometric properties that do not comply with these rules of thumb. Using simulated data, they concluded that items with low scalability had some influence on the reliability of test scores, person ordering and selection, and criterion-related validity estimates. Removing the misfitting items from the scale had, in general, a small effect on the outcomes. Although important outcome variables were fairly robust against scale violations in some conditions, authors conclude that researchers should not rely exclusively on algorithms allowing automatic selection of items. In particular, content validity must be taken into account to build sensible psychometric instruments.

Mokken量表分析是一种流行的方法，用于评估临床和人格问卷及其各个项目的心理计量质量。尽管许多经验性论文都报告了套项目构成Mokken量表的程度，但是对于违反常用经验法则的影响关注较少。在这项研究中，作者调查了保留或删除不符合这些经验法则的具有心理测量特性的物品的实际后果。他们使用模拟数据得出的结论是，可扩展性较低的项目对测试分数，人员排序和选择以及与标准相关的有效性估计的可靠性有一定影响。通常，从量表中删除不合适的项目对结果的影响很小。尽管重要的结果变量在某些情况下可以很好地抵抗规模违规，但作者得出的结论是，研究人员不应仅依赖允许自动选择项目的算法。特别是，必须考虑内容的有效性，以构建明智的心理测量工具。