Issues That Should Not Be Overlooked in the Dominance Versus Ideal Point Controversy

摘要

Drasgow, Chernyshenko, and Stark (2010) argue that "responses to questions requir-ing introspection involve a comparison process," and we agree with this state-ment. The key question is, however, what do respondents compare themselves to? Drasgow et al. suggest that respondents always compare their self-perception to the statement's location (an ideal point); there-fore, ideal point models should always be used. We feel the answer depends on the construct being measured and on the type of items used to measure it. Sometimes the response mechanism appears to be an ideal point process. But many other times we believe that given a statement and a binary (endorseot endorse) rating scale, an indi-vidual will endorse the item if its utility is larger than a certain threshold and will not endorse it otherwise. In this case respon-dents compare themselves to a threshold, which calls for the use of a dominance model.