Intellectual Achievement Responsibility. a Many-facet Rasch Model Analysis of the Scale by Crandall, Katkovsky and Crandall

The present study consists in the analysis of the responses of 485 high school Italian students to the items of the Intellectual Achievement Responsibility questionnaire (IAR; Crandall, Katkovsky, & Crandall, 1965) in view of the definition of a new form of the scale. The Italian version by Nigro and Galli (1988) was applied to the participants. The data were analyzed by means of the Many-Facet Rasch Model (MFRM; Linacre, 1989) approach. Within the frame of Rasch analyses, the MFRM allowed the parameterization of complex measurement situations in which different aspects might interfere between the ability of the person and the difficulty of the item, such as specific social, educational, or clinical attributes characterizing the persons, or different occasions in which the items are administered, or different methods applied to administer them, or different judges used to evaluate test performance, and so on. In this study, the MFRM allowed the definition of a psychometrically valid form of the IAR scale which consisted of 30 items, 15 for the I+ score and 15 for the I– score. Such items were not only well calibrated on the continuum of the latent trait characteristic of the intellectual achievement responsibility, but they were also free from biases such as those derived from the interaction with gender, type of school attended by the students, school grade, and parental cultural level.