Response Accuracy & Validity Scales

Active

Developing open-source tools to detect careless, inconsistent, and distorted responding in psychological research and assessment — including informant-report validity scales and brief, appendable inconsistency and under-reporting measures.

Validity scales Careless responding Over-reporting Informant report PID-5 Data quality

Self-report and informant data are only as good as the care and honesty behind each response. Careless responding, social-desirability bias, and deliberate over- or under-reporting all erode the reliability of scales and the conclusions drawn from them — yet open, general-purpose tools to detect them are scarce.

This program, driven largely by Master of Professional Psychology research teams, builds and validates those tools: an over-reporting validity scale for the Personality Inventory for DSM-5 Informant Report Form, comparisons of careless-responding detection methods, and brief, appendable item-pair inconsistency and under-reporting scales that researchers can bolt onto any online survey. All are designed to be open-source and broadly applicable, so that researchers can screen poor-quality data and recover more representative estimates of participants’ true scores.