Measurement of agency, communion, and emotional vulnerability with the Personal Attributes Questionnaire

Factor analytic studies of the 24-item Personal Attributes Questionnaire (Spence & Helmreich, 1978) have reported inconsistent results, and a previous confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) indicated inadequate fit for factors corresponding to Masculinity, Femininity, and Masculinity-Femininity scales. In this research, we used CFA in a college sample (N = 382) to evaluate the 3-factor model, and we revised scales by eliminating 6 misspecified items. The revised model fit well in another college sample (N = 230). We renamed the revised scales Agency, Communion, and Emotional Vulnerability. In relation to Five-factor theory, Emotional Vulnerability and Communion correlated well with Neuroticism and Agreeableness, respectively, and Agency had moderate correlations with Neuroticism, Extraversion, and Conscientiousness. Psychometric results in the context of current theory suggest that Agency (Masculinity) may not be a fully adequate measure of the agency construct.     

Knowledge Judgments and Object Memory Processes in Early Childhood: Support for the Dual Criterion Account of Object Nameability Judgment

According to the dual criterion account of early linguistic judgment (Merriman & Lipko, 2008 Merriman , W. E. , & Lipko , A. R. (2008). A dual criterion account of the development of linguistic judgment in early childhood. Journal of Memory & Language , 58, 1012–1031. [Google Scholar]), preschool-aged children who possess more efficient object memory processes should also be more accurate judges of whether various objects have known names. In support of this claim, both the accuracy of object recognition and the speed of object naming were found to be correlated with the accuracy of object nameability judgments, but not with the accuracy of four other mentalistic judgments. Nameability judgments tended to be as accurate as judgments of word familiarity and judgments of the relation between seeing and knowing. These three judgments tended to be more accurate than false-belief judgments.     

Structural-equation models of current drug use: are appropriate models so simple(x)?

The simplex and common-factor models of drug use were compared using maximum-likelihood estimation of latent variable structural models in two samples: a sample of 226 high school students, using ratio-scale measures of current drug use, and a sample of 310 industrial workers and 811 college students, using ordinal-scale measures of current drug use. Latent variables of alcohol, marijuana, enhancer hard drugs, and dampener hard drugs were specified in a series of structural models. Contrary to previous findings with cumulative drug-use data, the common-factor model provided a more acceptable representation of the observed current-use data than did the simplex model in both samples. In addition, the similarity of results across both of these samples supports recent contentions by Huba and Bentler (1982) that quantitatively measured variables are not necessarily superior to qualitative, ordinal indicators in latent variable models of drug use.