You were instructed to critique a story about the workers of Hacienda Rhiana who were fighting for their rights. How would you critize the story?
Answers
Explanation:
Measuring the Reliability of Picture Story Exercises like the TAT
Nicole Gruber, Ludwig Kreuzpointner
Abstract
As frequently reported, psychometric assessments on Picture Story Exercises, especially variations of the Thematic Apperception Test, mostly reveal inadequate scores for internal consistency. We demonstrate that the reason for this apparent shortcoming is not caused by the coding system itself but from the incorrect use of internal consistency coefficients, especially Cronbach’s α. This problem could be eliminated by using the category-scores as items instead of the picture-scores. In addition to a theoretical explanation we prove mathematically why the use of category-scores produces an adequate internal consistency estimation and examine our idea empirically with the origin data set of the Thematic Apperception Test by Heckhausen and two additional data sets. We found generally higher values when using the category-scores as items instead of picture-scores. From an empirical and theoretical point of view, the estimated reliability is also superior to each category within a picture as item measuring. When comparing our suggestion with a multifaceted Rasch-model we provide evidence that our procedure better fits the underlying principles of PSE.
Citation: Gruber N, Kreuzpointner L (2013) Measuring the Reliability of Picture Story Exercises like the TAT. PLoS ONE 8(11): e79450. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0079450
Editor: Yinglin Xia, University of Rochester, United States of America
Received: April 19, 2013; Accepted: September 23, 2013; Published: November 5, 2013
Copyright: © 2013 Gruber, Kreuzpointner. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Funding: These authors have no support or funding to report.
Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.