Chunk #12 — Some general methodological considerations — Selection of symptoms or questionnaire items — Item content: severity

Source

Does nature have joints worth carving? A discussion of taxometrics, model-based clustering and latent variable mixture modeling.

Embedded

yes

Text

To provide an adequate basis for the desired inference it is therefore necessary to have items that differ gradually with respect to the probability of being endorsed by more affected individuals (dimensional construct). In case the construct is in fact categorical, such a set of items would not lead to biased inference. In fact, it would support the discrimination between two groups even if there are additional within-group severity differences (see Fig. 2b).