Chalmers R Philip, Campbell Sarah
York University, Toronto, ON, Canada.
Appl Psychol Meas. 2025 Jul 10:01466216251358492. doi: 10.1177/01466216251358492.
The reliable change index (RCI; Jacobson & Truax, 1991) is commonly used to assess whether individuals have changed across two measurement occasions, and has seen many augmentations and improvements since its initial conception. In this study, we extend an item response theory version of the RCI presented by Jabrayilov et al. (2016) by including empirical priors in the associated RCI computations whenever group-level differences are quantifiable given post-test response information. Based on a reanalysis and extension of a previous simulation study, we demonstrate that although a small amount of bias is added to the estimates of the latent trait differences when no true change is present, including empirical prior information will generally improve the Type I behavior of the model-based RCI. Consequently, when non-zero changes in the latent trait are present the bias and sampling variability are show to be more favorable than competing estimators, subsequently leading to an increase in power to detect non-zero changes.
可靠变化指数（RCI；雅各布森和特鲁克斯，1991）通常用于评估个体在两个测量时点之间是否发生了变化，自其最初提出以来已经有了许多扩充和改进。在本研究中，我们扩展了贾布雷洛夫等人（2016）提出的RCI的项目反应理论版本，只要根据测试后反应信息能够量化组间差异，就在相关的RCI计算中纳入经验先验。基于对先前一项模拟研究的重新分析和扩展，我们证明，尽管在不存在真实变化时会给潜在特质差异的估计值增加少量偏差，但纳入经验先验信息通常会改善基于模型的RCI的I型行为。因此，当潜在特质存在非零变化时，偏差和抽样变异性比其他竞争估计量更有利，从而导致检测非零变化的功效增加。
