Date: 2013-11-08

Time: 15:30-16:30

Location: BURN 1205

Abstract:

Health researchers often use patient and physician questionnaires to assess certain aspects of health status. Item Response Theory (IRT) provides a set of tools for examining the properties of the instrument and for estimation of the latent trait for each individual. In my research, I critically examine the usefulness of the summed score over items and an alternative weighted summed score (using weights computed from the IRT model) as an alternative to both the empirical Bayes estimator and maximum likelihood estimator for the Generalized Partial Credit Model. First, I will talk about two useful theoretical properties of the weighted summed score that I have proven as part of my work. Then I will relate the weighted summed score to other commonly used estimators of the latent trait. I will demonstrate the importance of these results in the context of both simulated and real data on the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale.

Speaker

Daphna Harel is a PhD candidate in our department. She works with Russ Steele.