The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions

Sound scale construction is pivotal to the measurement of psychological constructs. Common item sampling procedures emphasize aspects of reliability to the disadvantage of aspects of validity, which are less tangible. We use a health knowledge test as an example to demonstrate how item sampling strategies that either focus on factor saturation or construct coverage influence scale composition and demonstrate how to find a trade-off between these two opposing needs. More specifically, we compile three 75-item health knowledge scales using Ant Colony Optimization, a metaheuristic algorithm that is inspired by the foraging behavior of ants, to optimize factor saturation, construct coverage, or a compromise of both. We demonstrate that our approach is well suited to balance out construct coverage and factor saturation when constructing a health knowledge test. Finally, we discuss conceptual problems of modeling of declarative knowledge and provide recommendations for the assessment of health knowledge.

声音尺度构建对于心理构念的测量至关重要。常见的项目抽样程序强调可靠性方面，而相对地忽视了可验证性方面，后者较为抽象。以健康知识测试为例，我们展示了如何通过关注因子饱和度或构念覆盖度的项目抽样策略影响量表构成，并探讨了如何在满足这两者相互对立的需求之间找到平衡点。具体而言，我们利用受蚂蚁觅食行为启发的元启发式算法——蚁群优化，编制了三个包含75个项目的健康知识量表，以优化因子饱和度、构念覆盖度或二者的折中。我们证明了该方法在构建健康知识测试时，能够有效地平衡构念覆盖度和因子饱和度。最后，我们讨论了陈述性知识建模的概念性问题，并提出了健康知识评估的建议。