But not obese.

Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, about the damage done by pollution, “is widely credited with launching the environmental movement in the West” (Wikipedia). Along similar but narrower lines, last week’s USA Today had an article by Joyce Cohen about hearing damage caused by being in a marching band. It begins:

There’s no bigger booster of his marching band than Mark Claffey. “I am a total band nerd!” declares Claffey, a drummer for the Golden Falcons at Franklin Heights High School in Columbus, Ohio.

There’s just one downside. At age 17, he has painful ear damage.

He says that, after indoor rehearsals, his ears started hurting, then ringing.

Now, he’s abnormally sensitive to sound. If someone cranks the car radio, “I get a sharp shooting pain in my right ear,” says Claffey. . . .

It’s the dirty little secret of the halftime show: Marching band . . . can cause irreparable hearing damage, according to Brian Fligor, director of diagnostic audiology at Children’s Hospital in Boston.

The director of a professional group of music teachers claimed that knowledge of this problem is fairly new. That’s absurd, Joyce said. Stories about hearing problems among musicians have been published in medical and professional journals for at least two decades. Music teachers don’t acknowledge their own hearing problems, several experts told her, because doing so could endanger their livelihoods. Band parents, known for their fanaticism, were sometimes dismissive. They claimed that pain and ringing in the ears are normal.

The Indianapolis Star, published by Gannett, which also owns USA Today, reprinted the article. On the newspaper’s forums, readers started a debate about whether there should be laws to protect students’ hearing.

In 1993, Marilyn Harvey, who at the time was Ranjit Chandra’s research assistant, came forward to say that a paper by Chandra reported research that didn’t happen. Memorial University conducted an investigation that failed to confirm her (very courageous) allegation. About that investigation, Ranjit Chandra’s Wikipedia entry says the following:

The vice-presidents were unable to secure the data, and, as a consequence, were unable to verify research fraud conclusively.

Huh? Harvey’s claim was that the data didn’t exist!

This sentence was written by Peter S. Morris, Director of Public Affairs at Memorial. I emailed Morris to try to find out how it could make sense. Presumably it made sense to Morris. Alas, Morris would not explain it. He did say that to prove research fraud — in Chandra’s case, the fraud of making up data — you need the data. You read that correctly: To prove that someone has made up data you need to have the data, Morris asserted. He wouldn’t explain that, either.

Memorial’s behavior did great harm to Marilyn Harvey, as you can read in the complaint filed with her lawsuit.

5. What are you doing to develop a better test?

Not being a content expert in either emotions or intelligence myself, I have no plans at the moment to create a test of emotional intelligence. Instead, my goal is to explore and discuss, firstly, better ways of engaging in the iterative process of construct exploration and test development, and secondly, better methods of test analysis. These are, of course, interrelated.

The “classical” method of test construction in psychology goes like this: a) decide what you want to measure (formally or informally); b) write items to measure it; c) pilot those items; d) run basic statistical analyses, such as Cronbach’s alpha e) remove the items from the test that are the least reliable with the other items, thus improving the reliability of the test, and f) publish.

This process usually yields a reasonably reliable test. A problem with this approach is that nowhere did we allow the
process of test construction to inform our theory development. Test construction can be as much a process of construct exploration as anything else, if we allow it. For instance, think-alouds and exit interviews can help us understand what subjects are actually thinking as they take the test, and whether the variation in the ways people approach the items truly reflects variation in the construct we think we’re measuring. The exercise of construct mapping can turn a murky idea of what we’re measuring into a much clearer one, by laying out a priori theories about what kinds of items measure what levels of the construct, and those ideas can then be empirically tested later, which makes the analysis phase much more informative than it traditionally is. And, of course, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the analysis itself: item response modeling often affords valuable information missed by classical analysis, such as information on person and item “fit” (which, to be interpretable, requires going back to the theory of the link between the items and the construct itself, which once again benefits from thoughtful construct mapping) and information about dimensionality at the item level (as opposed to the branch level, which is where confirmatory factor models—such as the ones used to investigate the structure of the emotional intelligence tests I’m working with—traditionally concentrate).

Doing things in this manner usually takes more than one iteration, which is one reason people might not like it. So far, the MSCEIT has been developed and evaluated, and the test developers have spent a good deal of time debating other authors in the literature concerning the value of the test, but the analyses have not yet led to test revision (except in the manner I described above: that items with poor reliability were dropped, without any particular theory about *why* they were unreliable).

So, in other words: I won’t claim to be a substance expert enough to be able to write a new test of emotional intelligence on my own, but I would like to use the measurement efforts in this field as a way to discuss construct exploration and instrument development in psychological research.

Part 1. Part 2.

Reference

Wilson, M. (2005) Constructing Measures: An Item Response Modeling Approach. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates: Mahwah, New Jersey.