Psychological Test Toolbox: A New Tool to Compute Factor Analysis Controlling Response Bias

Abstract

The effects of response bias in psychological tests have been investigated for years, the two most common being social desirability (SD) and acquiescence (AC). However, the traditional methods for controlling or eliminating the impact of those biases in participants' scores have several limitations. Some factor analysis-based methods can overcome some of these limitations, such as the procedure proposed by Ferrando, Lorenzo-Seva, and Chico (2009). Nevertheless, this method involves programming skills that are not common among applied researchers or clinicians. Consequently, we have developed a stand-alone, user-friendly application that provides an easy way of using the aforementioned method to perform a factor analysis which controls for the effect of AC and SD. The program has been developed in the MATLAB environment and its distribution is entirely free.

Keywords

• response bias
• social desirability
• acquiescence
• exploratory factor analysis
• matlab