Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, USA.
Assessment. 2010 Jun;17(2):155-71. doi: 10.1177/1073191109350158. Epub 2009 Nov 14.
Although study of clinical phenomena in individuals from different ethnic backgrounds has improved over the years, African American and Asian American individuals continue to be underrepresented in research samples. Without adequate psychometric data about how questionnaires perform in individuals from different ethnic samples, findings from both within and across groups are arguably uninterpretable. Analyses based on item response theory (IRT) allow us to make fine-grained comparisons of the ways individuals from different ethnic groups respond to clinical measures. This study compared response patterns of African American and Asian American undergraduates to White undergraduates on measures of depression, social anxiety, and worry. On the Beck Depression Inventory-II, response patterns for African American participants were roughly equivalent to the response patterns of White participants. On measures of worry and social anxiety, there were substantial differences, suggesting that the use of these measures in African American and Asian American populations may lead to biased conclusions.
尽管近年来对不同族裔背景个体的临床现象进行研究已有改善，但在研究样本中，非裔美国人和亚裔美国人仍然代表性不足。如果没有关于问卷在不同族裔样本中的表现的充分心理计量学数据，那么来自不同群体的研究结果就难以解释。基于项目反应理论（IRT）的分析使我们能够对不同族裔群体对临床测量的反应方式进行精细的比较。本研究比较了非裔美国人和亚裔美国本科生与白人本科生在抑郁、社交焦虑和担忧方面的反应模式。在贝克抑郁量表二版上，非裔美国参与者的反应模式与白人参与者大致相当。在担忧和社交焦虑方面，存在显著差异，这表明在非裔美国人和亚裔美国人中使用这些测量工具可能会导致有偏差的结论。
