Watkins Marley W, Dombrowski Stefan C, McGill Ryan J, Canivez Gary L, Pritchard Alison E, Jacobson Lisa A
Department of Educational Psychology, Baylor University, Waco, TX 76798, USA.
Department of Graduate Education, Leadership and Counseling, Rider University, Lawrenceville, NJ 08648, USA.
J Intell. 2023 Jul 10;11(7):137. doi: 10.3390/jintelligence11070137.
One important aspect of construct validity is structural validity. Structural validity refers to the degree to which scores of a psychological test are a reflection of the dimensionality of the construct being measured. A factor analysis, which assumes that unobserved latent variables are responsible for the covariation among observed test scores, has traditionally been employed to provide structural validity evidence. Factor analytic studies have variously suggested either four or five dimensions for the WISC-V and it is unlikely that any new factor analytic study will resolve this dimensional dilemma. Unlike a factor analysis, an exploratory graph analysis (EGA) does not assume a common latent cause of covariances between test scores. Rather, an EGA identifies dimensions by locating strongly connected sets of scores that form coherent sub-networks within the overall network. Accordingly, the present study employed a bootstrap EGA technique to investigate the structure of the 10 WISC-V primary subtests using a large clinical sample ( = 7149) with a mean age of 10.7 years and a standard deviation of 2.8 years. The resulting structure was composed of four sub-networks that paralleled the first-order factor structure reported in many studies where the fluid reasoning and visual-spatial dimensions merged into a single dimension. These results suggest that discrepant construct and scoring structures exist for the WISC-V that potentially raise serious concerns about the test interpretations of psychologists who employ the test structure preferred by the publisher.
结构效度是构想效度的一个重要方面。结构效度指的是心理测试分数在多大程度上反映了所测量构想的维度。传统上，人们采用因子分析来提供结构效度证据，因子分析假定未观察到的潜在变量是观察到的测试分数之间协变的原因。因子分析研究对韦氏儿童智力量表第五版（WISC-V）的维度有不同的建议，认为可能是四个或五个维度，而且不太可能有新的因子分析研究能解决这个维度困境。与因子分析不同，探索性图分析（EGA）并不假定测试分数之间协变有一个共同的潜在原因。相反，EGA通过定位在整个网络中形成连贯子网的强连接分数集来识别维度。因此，本研究采用了自举EGA技术，使用一个平均年龄为10.7岁、标准差为2.8岁的大型临床样本（n = 7149）来研究WISC-V的10个主要子测试的结构。所得结构由四个子网组成，这与许多研究中报告的一阶因子结构相似，在这些研究中，流体推理和视觉空间维度合并为一个维度。这些结果表明，WISC-V存在不一致的构想和评分结构，这可能会引发对采用出版商偏好的测试结构的心理学家的测试解释的严重担忧。
