I’m pleased to announce to #polisky our forthcoming APSR article, “Measurement that Matches Theory.” In it, we introduce a Bayesian IRT framework that allows users to identify latent dimensions with substantive theoretical meaning. The paper is open access for now here: tinyurl.com/48ktz5jc. (1/8)🧵 - ThreadSky

daveasiegel.bsky.social • 171 days ago

I’m pleased to announce to #polisky our forthcoming APSR article, “Measurement that Matches Theory.” In it, we introduce a Bayesian IRT framework that allows users to identify latent dimensions with substantive theoretical meaning. The paper is open access for now here: https://tinyurl.com/48ktz5jc. (1/8)🧵

Comments

rmkubinec.bsky.social•171 days ago

What is the associated R package? I couldn't find the name in the paper.

daveasiegel.bsky.social•171 days ago

It's here: https://github.com/dasiegel/IRT-M

daveasiegel.bsky.social•171 days ago

There’s an accompanying R package with a vignette as well here: https://github.com/dasiegel/IRT-M. (2/8).

daveasiegel.bsky.social•171 days ago

We call this framework IRT-M, and it makes it easier for researchers to construct, measure, and present subtle or abstract concepts in their data. It’s a semi-supervised method. First, researchers identify theoretically meaningful latent dimensions. (3/8)

daveasiegel.bsky.social•171 days ago

Then, researchers identify data sources and assess how the latent dimensions would show up in the data, which can depend on context. Then, they construct a constraint matrix that encodes dependencies between items in the data and the latent dimensions. (4/8)

daveasiegel.bsky.social•171 days ago

The package does the rest. The latent dimensions it captures can be correlated, and IRT-M discovers any such correlation from the data. The supervised steps ensure that the measures remain consistent across time and space. (5/8)

daveasiegel.bsky.social•171 days ago

There’s a lot more in the paper. For example, the figure shows how IRT-M can produce estimates of abstract concepts (sense of "threat", by the media sources that they trust) in data not designed to measure the concepts (the Eurobarometer survey). (6/8)

daveasiegel.bsky.social•171 days ago

We think the framework has the potential to help a lot of measurement problems. We’re working right now to extend the input data from dichotomous to multichotomous and continuous as well. It may be of interest to #econsky as well. (7/8)

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