The Investigation of Cognitive Models for Inventory Response

This research centers around a family of models designed to describe individuals' responses to personality inventory responses. The models are all alternative ways of relating the individual's degree of endorsement of the items to their locations on dimensions of semantic meaning as he perceives them. In the present study, the relationships among individuals' responses to adjective check list items and multidimensional scaling analyses of similarity judgments of the same items were studied. For each individual, a multiple correlation was computed between his endorsement of the items and their locations on dimensions. The median R, corrected for the number of predictors, was .81 in the case of "candid" endorsements and .92 for endorsements under a faking set. These correlations are comparable to the consistencies in endorsement across repetitions of the same items. Implications for a personality measurement theory are discussed.