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Item response theory and the measurement of psychiatric constructs: some empirical and conceptual issues and challenges

Item response theory (IRT) measurement models are now commonly used in educational, psychological, and health-outcomes measurement, but their impact in the evaluation of measures of psychiatric constructs remains limited. Herein we present two, somewhat contradictory, theses. The first is that, when skillfully applied, IRT has much to offer psychiatric measurement in terms of scale development, psychometric analysis, and scoring. The second argument, however, is that psychiatric measurement presents some unique challenges to the application of IRT – challenges that may not be easily addressed by application of conventional IRT models and methods. These challenges include, but are not limited to, the modeling of conceptually narrow constructs and their associated limited item pools, and unipolar constructs where the expected latent trait distribution is highly skewed.