A questionable questionnaire: a rejoinder to Marks

In a recent article Marks argues that two previous articles in this journal in 1986 and 1988, questioning the construct validity of the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire, should be dismissed due to methodological flaws and overwhelming evidence to the contrary. In this response to Marks, the methodologies of the two studies in question are clarified and defended. Research and other evidence supporting the two Chara studies are presented. It is concluded that the construct validity of the imagery questionnaire has not been established and that further investigations of the questionnaire, and particularly its rating scale, are warranted.     

A rejoinder to Bimrose & Bayne

To understand the role of theory in guidance, it is reasonable to ask if the theories taught to guidance practitioners are applied in the manner of applied science and, if this is not so, to enquire further into their connection to practice. This is, it is contended, what the earlier article by Kidd et al. does. The status of guidance as a profession is immaterial in this regard, and was not, therefore, considered in the article. Bimrose & Bayne accuse the article of ignoring parts of the literature which were either not relevant, or were actually considered in the conduct of the study on which the article was based. Their methodological criticisms, which are considered particularly gratuitous, fall into two categories: those based upon misreading, and those which are so seriously undeveloped as to verge on the incomprehensible. The need for a clear rationale for theory in guidance is asserted, and it is not pretended that the article has achieved such a rationale. Bimrose & Bayne's views about what guidance is or might be are all very well, but do not yet amount to a convincing rationale either. It is suggested that there are closer parallels between the article and the views of its critics than they acknowledge.     

Negation: A rejoinder to Wales and Grieve

Wales and Grieve (1969) report an experiment in which they show that a factor of “confusability” affects the comprehension of affirmative and negative sentences, and then claim that this is a relevant factor in explaining the difficulty of negatives. The present paper submits arguments and experimental evidence to dispute this claim.     

In search of explanations: A rejoinder to Borkenau

The main points raised by Borkenau against our challenge of the 'intuitive psychometrics' view of personality judgements are discussed, in particular his example of the link between school grades and intelligence. It is argued that the semantic similarity interpretation advanced in our paper is more adequate and more parsimonious than explanations in terms of psychometric reasoning.     

Random controls: A rejoinder

Furedy, Poulos, and Schiffman (1975) have made a conclusion in direct contradiction to available data in skin conductance conditioning which show clearly that a stimulus designated to be random was, in fact, random with respect to an unconditioned stimulus. It was also pointed out that the overlap criterion does illustrate the weakness of the Toronto studies; that the random stimulus in the Prokasy, Williams, Kumpfer, and Lee (1973) paper was not excitatory; and that controlled studies for at least a decade have shown the first-interval response to be associative.