Dr. R. J. Wirth, VPG Managing Partner, has joined the North Carolina Technology Association as a member of the Board of Advisors. The NCTA Board of Advisors serve as a sounding board to help grow NCTA’s membership and profile as the primary voice for North Carolina’s tech sector.
All posts by Li Cai
Dr. James McGinley joins VPG
Vector Psychometric Group, LLC is excited to welcome Dr. James McGinley to the VPG team. After earning his PhD in Quantitative Psychology with a minor in Biostatistics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Dr. McGinley founded McGinley Statistical Consulting where he successfully aided pharmaceutical and academic clients in developing, conducting, and disseminating original programs of research. This work has resulted in numerous conference presentations and peer-reviewed publications. Dr. McGinley’s research focuses on novel mixed-effects models for ordinal … Read More
VPG paper in Top 1% of psychiatry/psychology citations
Web of Science reports that as of Nov/Dec 2014, the Wirth and Edwards (2007) paper entitled “Item factor analysis: Current approaches and future directions” is a “highly cited paper” and is “in the top 1% of the academic field of Psychiatry/Psychology” for the publication year 2007. Download a copy here
Binge Eating PRO Publication
VPG and Shire PLC to publish a “Validation of the Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale Modified for Binge Eating” in the International Journal of Eating Disorders. A link to the article and supplemental materials will be provided when they become available.
Pediatric PRO Development
VPG and Johnson & Johnson Vision Care Inc. will be presenting “A Patient- Reported Outcomes (PRO) questionnaire for the pediatric soft contact lens wearer: Pediatric Contact Lens User Experience (pCLUE)’” at the 2015 British Contact Lens Association Conference (29 – 31 May) in Liverpool, UK.
New IRT Handbook Available
A new Handbook of Item Response Theory Modeling (edited by Reise & Revicki) is available. Check out the chapters on parameter estimation (Chapter 3) and multidimensioanl IRT (Chapter 8) coauthored by VPG. Also see examples using flexMIRT® (VPG’s IRT software) in Chapters 4, 6, 8, and 10.
Detecting local dependence
A new paper in Applied Psychological Measurement authored by VPG’s Drs. Houts and Edwards examines methods for better understanding detection of surface and underlying local dependence in IRT models. An early online copy of “Comparing Surface and Underlying Local Dependence Levels via Polychoric Correlations” is now available..
International Psychometric Society Meeting: flexMIRT® Short Course
Drs. Cai and Wirth will be holding an IRT software short-course entitled “flexMIRT®: Flexible multilevel multidimensional item analysis and test scoring” this July 12th in Beijing China. The course will be taught in English with some annotations and translations to Chinese. For more information please see the IMPS 2015 course description.
flexMIRT® workshop at NCME 2015
VPG will be offering a 1-day flexMIRT® IRT software workshop entitled “flexMIRT®: Flexible Multilevel Multidimensional Item Analysis and Test Scoring”. The class will be held on April 15th 2015 in Chicago Illinois as part of NCME’s pre-conference training program. For more information see page 9 of the 2015 NCME Preliminary Program.
Dr. Cai Joins England’s STA Technical Advisory Group as VPG representitive
Dr. Li Cai, a VPG Managing Partner, joined England’s Standards & Testing Agency’s Technical Advisory Group. The group oversees and advises on technical matters regarding psychometric developments and implementation of national academic tests.