Rhetoric of psychological measurement theory and practice.

Metascience scholars have long been concerned with tracking the use of rhetorical language in scientific discourse, oftentimes to analyze the legitimacy and validity of scientific claim-making. Psychology, however, has only recently become the explicit target of such metascientific scholarship, much of which has been in response to the recent crises surrounding replicability of quantitative research findings and questionable research practices. The focus of this paper is on the rhetoric of psychological measurement and validity scholarship, in both the theoretical and methodological and empirical literatures.

Primary Study Quality in Psychological Meta-Analyses: An Empirical Assessment of Recent Practice.

As meta-analytic research has come to occupy a sizeable contingent of published work in the psychological sciences, clarity in the reporting of such work is crucial to its interpretability and reproducibility. This is especially true regarding the assessment of primary study quality, as notions of study quality can vary across research domains. The present study examines the general state of reporting practices related to primary study quality in a sample of 382 published psychological meta-analyses, as well as the reporting decisions and motivations of the authors that published them.

A psychometric evaluation of the Multidimensional Social Competence Scale (MSCS) for young adults.

The current study contributes to previous work on measuring the social phenotype in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) by validating a multidimensional test of social competence developed for use with individuals with and without ASD. The "Multidimensional Social Competence Scale" (MSCS) was previously validated as a parent-rating scale with youth 11-18 years with ASD without intellectual disability and typically developing adolescents of comparable age. The current study presents a validation of a self-report version of the MSCS in a non-clinical young adult population (N = 1178, males = 360, females = 817, age range = 17-25 years).

A proposed framework for conducting data-based test analysis.

The authors argue that the current state of applied data-based test analytic practice is unstructured and unmethodical due in large part to the fact that there is no clearly specified, widely accepted test analytic framework for judging the performances of particular tests in particular contexts. Drawing from the extant test theory literature, they propose a rationale that may be used in data-based test analysis. The components of the proposed test analytic framework are outlined in detail, as are examples of the framework as applied to commonly encountered test evaluative scenarios.

The use of the MacCAT-CA with adolescents: an item response theory investigation of age-related measurement bias.

Despite the application of the MacCAT-CA to juveniles, questions been raised regarding the appropriateness of this tool for adolescents. The current study tested for age-related measurement bias using data from the MacArthur Juvenile Adjudicative Competence Study (n = 1393). Five of the MacCAT-CA items showed age-related measurement bias (i.