ABSTRACT

Purpose

This article demonstrates the advantages of using both confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and item response theory (IRT) in the development and evaluation of social work scales with dichotomous or polytomous items. Social work researchers have commonly employed CFA and internal consistency reliability tests to validate scales for use in research- and evidence-based practice; IRT has been underused. We report findings from CFA and IRT analyses of a short social isolation scale for elementary school students to demonstrate that scale development and validation can benefit from complementary use of the two methods. Results provided evidence that scores from the scale are statistically sound, and each method contributed valuable information.

Method

Data collected from 626 third- through fifth-grade students using the social isolation scale from the Elementary School Success Profile (ESSP) were examined with both CFA and IRT.

Results

Complementary CFA and IRT results provide detailed information about item and scale performance of the social isolation scale.

Discussion

Evidence-based practice requires scales with known properties; knowledge of those properties is more complete when researchers use both CFA and IRT.

Conclusion

Using IRT modeling in combination with CFA can help social work researchers ensure the quality of scales they recommend to practitioners and researchers.

中文翻译：

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项目反应理论和验证性因素分析：规模发展的补充方法

摘要

目的

本文展示了同时使用验证性因素分析 (CFA) 和项目反应理论 (IRT) 在具有二分或多分项目的社会工作量表的开发和评估中的优势。社会工作研究人员通常采用 CFA 和内部一致性可靠性测试来验证用于研究和循证实践的量表；IRT 未被充分利用。我们报告了 CFA 和 IRT 对小学生社交孤立量表的分析结果，以证明量表的开发和验证可以从这两种方法的互补使用中受益。结果证明该量表的分数在统计上是合理的，并且每种方法都提供了有价值的信息。

方法

使用来自小学成功概况 (ESSP) 的社会隔离量表从 626 名三年级到五年级学生收集的数据通过 CFA 和 IRT 进行了检查。

结果

补充的 CFA 和 IRT 结果提供了有关社会隔离量表的项目和量表性能的详细信息。

讨论

循证实践需要具有已知特性的量表；当研究人员同时使用 CFA 和 IRT 时，对这些属性的了解会更加完整。

结论

将 IRT 建模与 CFA 结合使用可以帮助社会工作研究人员确保他们向从业者和研究人员推荐的量表的质量。