Ulrich Schroeders

Universität Kassel · Department of Psychology

The advent of large-scale assessment, but also the more frequent use of longitudinal and multivariate approaches to measurement in psychological, educational, and sociological research, caused an increased demand for psychometrically sound short scales. Shortening scales economizes on valuable administration time, but might result in inadequate mea...

Although crystallized intelligence (gc) is a prominent factor in contemporary theories of individual differences in intelligence, its structure and optimal measurement are elusive. Analogously to the personality trait hierarchy, we propose the following hierarchy of declarative fact knowledge as a key component of gc: a general fact knowledge facto...

Careless responding is a bias in survey responses that disregards the actual item content, constituting a threat to the factor structure, reliability, and validity of psychological measurements. Different approaches have been proposed to detect aberrant responses such as probing questions that directly assess test-taking behavior (e.g., bogus items...

Alexithymia is defined as the inability of persons to describe their emotional states, to identify the feelings of others, and a utilitarian type of thinking. The most popular instrument to assess alexithymia is the Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20). Despite its widespread use, an ongoing controversy pertains to its internal structure. The TAS-20...

The Need for Cognition Scale (NCS) is a self-report scale measuring individual differences in the tendency to engage in and enjoy thinking. The shortened scale with 18 items (NCS-18; Cacioppo et al., 1984) has widely been administered in research on persuasion, critical thinking, and educational achievement. Whereas most studies advocated for essen...

The factor structure of Personality Disorder (PD) criteria has long been debated, but due to previous heterogenous findings, a common structure to represent covariation among DSM-IV/DSM-5 Section II PD criteria remains an open question. This study integrated a total of N = 30,545 PD assessments from 25 samples to conduct an individual participant m...

Objective With meta-analytically estimated rates of about 25%, dropout in psychotherapies is a major concern for individuals, clinicians, and the healthcare system at large. To be able to counteract dropout in psychotherapy, accurate insights about its predictors are needed. Method We compared logistic regression models with two machine learning a...

Meta-analyses of treatment effects in randomized control trials are often faced with the problem of missing information required to calculate effect sizes and their sampling variances. Particularly, correlations between pre-and posttest scores are frequently not available. As an ad-hoc solution, researchers impute a constant value for the missing c...

In psychological assessment, vocabulary tests are used as efficient indicators of crystallized intelligence, retrospective proxies of premorbid intelligence, and measures of language proficiency. Vocabulary tests widely used for German-speaking adults are outdated, rely on small standardization samples, and lack a transparent construction rationale...

Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithms have previously been used to compile single short scales of psychological constructs. In the present article, we showcase the versatility of the ACO to simultaneously construct multiple parallel short scales that adhere to several competing and interacting criteria. Based on an initial pool of 120 knowledge...

The reminiscence bump describes an increased recollection of autobiographic experiences made in adolescence and early adulthood. It is unclear if this phenomenon can also be found for declarative knowledge of past public events. To answer this question, we assessed public events knowledge (PEK) about the past six decades with a 120-item knowledge t...

Suicide is a major global health concern and a prominent cause of death in adolescents. Previous research on suicide prediction has mainly focused on clinical or adult samples. To prevent suicides at an early stage, however, it is important to screen for risk factors in a community sample of adolescents. We compared the accuracy of logistic regress...

In this chapter, we discuss how a combination of longitudinal modeling and local structural equation modeling (LSEM) can be used to study how students’ context influence their growth in educational achievement. LSEM is a nonparametric approach that allows for the moderation of a structural equation model over a continuous variable (e.g., socio-econ...

Metaheuristics are optimization algorithms that efficiently solve a variety of complex combinatorial problems. In psychological research, metaheuristics have been applied in short-scale construction and model specification search. In the present study, we propose a bee swarm optimization (BSO) algorithm to explore the structure underlying a psychol...

Building on the long common history of board games and intelligence research, we have developed a new deductive reasoning test based on the popular game Mastermind. Research questions of this registered report are: (a) Is a psychometrically sound measurement of the ability to solve Mastermind items possible (i.e., a reliable, one-dimensional measur...

By violating social norms, deviant behavior is an important issue that affects society as a whole and also has serious consequences for its individuals. Different scientific disciplines have proposed theories on deviant behavior, which often fall short of predicting actual behavior. In this registered report, we will use data of the longitudinal Na...

Objective Previous research on psychotherapy treatment response has mainly focused on outpatients or clinical trial data which may have low ecological validity regarding naturalistic inpatient samples. To reduce treatment failures by proactively screening for patients at risk of low treatment response, gain more knowledge about risk factors, and t...

The Core Self-Evaluations Scale (CSES) measures a broad personality trait reflecting individuals’ self-appraisals of their worth, capabilities, and control of their lives. Although the CSES was designed to capture a single trait, factor analytic studies often found more complex measurement structures. These either referred to different content face...

Research on self-reported knowledge and overclaiming in children is sparse. With the current study, we aim to close this gap by developing an overclaiming questionnaire measuring self-reported knowledge and overclaiming that is tailored to children. Moreover, we examine the nomological net of self-reported knowledge and overclaiming in childhood di...

Metaheuristics are optimization algorithms that efficiently solve a variety of complex combinatorial problems. In psychological research, metaheuristics have been mainly applied to compile psychometrically sound short scales. In the present proof-of-concept study, we introduce a Bee Swarm Optimization (BSO) algorithm to explore the structure underl...

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 focus on either factor saturation or c...

The Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP) organizes phenotypes of mental disorder based on empirical covariation, offering a comprehensive organizational framework from narrow symptoms to broader patterns of psychopathology. We argue that established self‐report measures of psychopathology from the pre‐HiTOP era should be systematically...

The Latin Square Task (LST) was proposed as a theoretically well-grounded paradigm for measuring fluid intelligence. In four studies (total N = 3,439) we systematically investigated the psychometric properties of LSTs. Results provided evidence that (a) the construct is unidimensional, (b) the administered stimulus types and the rotation of the ite...

The Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP) organizes phenotypes of mental disorder based on empirical covariation, offering a comprehensive organizational framework from narrow symptoms to broader patterns of psychopathology. We argue that established self-report measures of psychopathology from the pre-HiTOP era should be systematically...

Crystallized intelligence (gc) is considered culture-specific, but this notion is rarely substantiated empirically. We empirically investigated to what extent the measurement of declarative knowledge depends on the national specificity of its indicators and on individuals’ affinity for certain countries, respectively. Therefore, we administered a k...

Parental socio-economic status (SES) is often found to be associated with children's language competence in the first decade of life. To examine the effect of SES on children's vocabulary development, as well as potential compensatory effects of schooling and learning-related activities, we examined the joint and unique effects of parental educatio...

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 c...

Objective: We examine the trajectories of and the dynamic interplay between cognitive functioning and depressive symptoms in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) in comparison to healthy controls (HC) from an intraindividual perspective. Method: The DeNoPa study is a single-center, observational, longitudinal study with biennial follow-ups ove...

Attrition in longitudinal studies is a major threat to the representativeness of the data and the generalizability of the findings. Typical approaches to address systematic nonresponse are either expensive and unsatisfactory (e.g., oversampling) or rely on the unrealistic assumption of data missing at random (e.g., multiple imputation). Thus, model...

Objective Suicide is a major global health concern and a prominent cause of death in adolescents. Previous research on suicide prediction has mainly focused on clinical or adult samples. To prevent suicides at an early stage, however, it is important to screen for risk factors in a community sample of adolescents. Method We compared the accuracy o...

Meta-analyses of treatment effects in randomized control trials are often faced with the problem of missing information required to calculate effect sizes and their sampling variances. Particularly, correlations between pre- and posttest scores are frequently not available. As an ad-hoc solution, researchers impute a constant value for the missing...

The differentiation-dedifferentiation hypothesis of general cognitive ability has been widely studied, but comparable research on crystallized intelligence is scarce. To close this gap, we conducted an empirical test of the age differentiation hypothesis of declarative knowledge as proposed in Cattell's investment theory, which predicts that knowle...

Research on self-reported knowledge and overclaiming in children is sparse. With the current study, we aim to close this gap by developing an overclaiming questionnaire measuring self-reported knowledge and overclaiming that is tailored to children. Moreover, we examine the nomological net of self-reported knowledge and overclaiming in childhood di...

Objective: We examine the trajectories of and the dynamic interplay between cognitive functioning and depressive symptoms in patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) in comparison to healthy controls (HC) from an intraindividual perspective. Method: The DeNoPa study is a single-center, observational, longitudinal study with biennial follow-ups over...

In contrast to measures of working memory capacity, tests for fluid intelligence are elusive in their psychometric properties. Somewhat surprisingly, fluid intelligence is not as tractable as often conceived. We studied Latin Square Tasks (LSTs) as a group of indicators that supposedly can improve measurement of fluid intelligence. In four studies...

Attrition in longitudinal studies is a major threat to the representativeness of the data and the generalizability of the findings. Typical approaches to address systematic nonresponse are either expensive and unsatisfactory (e.g., oversampling) or rely on the unrealistic assumption of data missing at random (e.g., multiple imputation). Thus, model...

The differentiation-dedifferentiation hypothesis of general cognitive ability has been widely studied, but comparable research on crystallized intelligence is scarce. To close this gap, we conducted an empirical test of the age differentiation hypothesis of declarative knowledge as proposed in Cattell's investment theory, which predicts that knowle...

Alexithymia is defined as the inability of persons to describe their emotional states, to identify the feelings of others, and a utilitarian type of thinking. The most popular instrument to assess alexithymia is the Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20). Despite its widespread use, an ongoing controversy pertains to its internal structure. The TAS-20...

Cross-cultural comparisons often focus on differences in broad personality traits across countries. However, many cross-cultural studies report differential item functioning which suggests that considerable group differences are not accounted for by the overarching personality factors. We argue that this may reflect cross-cultural personality diffe...

Intelligence has been declared as a necessary but not sufficient condition for creativity, which was subsequently (erroneously) translated into the so-called threshold hypothesis. This hypothesis predicts a change in the correlation between creativity and intelligence at around 1.33 standard deviations above the population mean. A closer inspection...

Intelligence has been declared as a necessary but not sufficient condition for creativity, which was subsequently (erroneously) translated into the so-called threshold hypothesis. This hypothesis predicts a change in the correlation between creativity and intelligence at around 1.33 standard deviations above the population mean. A closer inspection...

Although crystallized intelligence (gc) is a prominent factor in contemporary theories of individual differences in intelligence, its structure and optimal measurement are elusive. Analogously to the personality trait hierarchy, we propose the following hierarchy of declarative fact knowledge as a key component of gc: a general fact knowledge facto...

Divergent thinking (DT) is an important constituent of creativity that captures aspects of fluency and originality. The literature lacks multivariate studies that report relationships between DT and its aspects with relevant covariates, such as cognitive abilities, personality traits (e.g. openness), and insight. In two multivariate studies (N = 15...

Overclaiming has been described as people’s tendency to overestimate their cognitive abilities in general and their knowledge in particular. We discuss four different perspectives on the phenomenon of overclaiming that have been proposed in the research literature: Overclaiming as a result of a) self-enhancement tendencies, b) as a cognitive bias (...

Careless responding is considered a bias in survey responses without regard to the actual item content which constitutes a threat to the factor structure, reliability, and validity of psychological measurements. Different approaches have been proposed to detect aberrant responses such as probing questions that directly assess test-taking behavior (...

Careless responding is considered a bias in survey responses without regard to the actual item content which constitutes a threat to the factor structure, reliability, and validity of psychological measurements. Different approaches have been proposed to detect aberrant responses such as probing questions that directly assess test-taking behavior (...

Overclaiming has been described as people's tendency to overestimate their cognitive abilities in general and their knowledge in particular. We discuss four different perspectives on the phenomenon of overclaiming that have been proposed in the research literature: Overclaiming as a result of a) self-enhancement tendencies, b) as a cognitive bias (...

Cheating is a serious threat in unproctored ability assessment, irrespective of countermeasures taken, anticipated consequences (high vs. low stakes), and test modality (paper-pencil vs. computer-based). In the present study, we examined the power of (a) self-report-based indicators (i.e., Honesty-Humility and Overclaiming scales), (b) test data (i...

Does parental involvement or formal education reduce the often found competence gap between children from different socioeconomic backgrounds? To answer this question, we examined the joint and unique effects of parental education, socioeconomic status, and home learning environment on children’s vocabulary competence and growth in early childhood....

Examining the influence of culture on personality and its unbiased assessment is the main subject of cross-cultural personality research. Recent large-scale studies exploring personality differences across cultures share substantial methodological and psychometric shortcomings that render it difficult to differentiate between method and trait varia...

In this chapter, we illustrate how local structural equation modeling can be used to study the moderation effects of continous context variables on developmental trajectories. More specifically, we investigated the effects of parental education on students' reading and math ability acquisition across four school years. We used data from the Nationa...

Cross-cultural comparisons often focus on differences in broad personality traits across countries. However, many cross-cultural studies report differential item functioning which suggests that considerable group differences are not accounted for by the overarching personality factors. We argue that this may reflect cross-cultural personality diffe...

Academic self-concept is understood as a multidimensional, hierarchical construct. Multidimensionality refers to the subject-specific differentiation of academic self-concepts, whereas hierarchy refers to the aggregation of more specific facets of self-concepts into more general ones. Previous research demonstrated that students distinguish between...

There is consensus that the ten items of the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (RSES) reflect wording effects resulting from positively and negatively keyed items. The present study examined the effects of cognitive abilities on the factor structure of the RSES with a novel, non-parametric latent variable technique called Local Structural Equation Models...

Academic self-concept is understood as a multidimensional, hierarchical construct. Multidimensionality refers to the subject-specific differentiation of academic self-concepts, whereas hierarchy refers to the aggregation of more specific facets of self-concepts into more general ones. Previous research demonstrated that students distinguish between...

Both academic self-concept and interest are considered domain-specific constructs. Previous research has not yet explored how the composition of the courses affects the domain-specificity of these constructs. Using data from a large-scale study in Germany, we compared ninth-grade students who were taught science as an integrated subject with studen...

The reciprocal internal/external frame of reference model (RI/EM) extends the internal/external frame of reference model (I/EM) over time and the reciprocal effects model (REM) across domains. The RI/EM postulates positive developmental relations between academic achievement and self-concept within a domain and negative relations across two non-mat...

Measurement in personality development faces many psychometric problems. First, theory‐based measurement models do not fit the empirical data in terms of traditional confirmatory factor analysis. Second, measurement invariance across age, which is necessary for a meaningful interpretation of age‐associated personality differences, is rarely accompl...

Measurement in personality development faces many psychometric problems. First, theory-based measurement models do not fit the empirical data in terms of traditional confirmatory factor analysis. Second, the interpretation of developmental trajectories often hinges on age-invariant measurement models which are rarely accomplished. Finally, continuo...

Personality development research heavily relies on the comparison of scale means across age. This approach implicitly assumes that the scales are strictly measurement-invariant across age. We questioned this assumption by examining whether appropriate personality indicators change over the lifespan. Moreover, we identified which types of items (e.g...

Crystallized intelligence (gc) is a prominent factor in consensual theories on the structure of intelligence. Although declarative knowledge is arguably a core aspect of gc, little is known about the dimensionality of knowledge in adults; the proposed dimensional models vary broadly from unidimensionality, to three-dimensional models (science, huma...

Measurement invariance is a key concept in psychological assessment and a fundamental prerequisite for meaningful comparisons across groups. In the prevalent approach, multigroup confirmatory factor analysis (MGCFA), specific measurement parameters are constrained to equality across groups. The degrees of freedom (df) for these models readily follo...

Unproctored, web-based assessments are frequently compromised by a lack of control over the participants’ test taking behavior. It is likely that participants cheat if personal consequences are high. This meta-analysis summarizes findings on context effects in unproctored and proctored ability assessments and examines mean score differences and cor...

Sex differences in mathematics achievement have been a controversial topic in educational psychology for a long time. This study sheds light on the developmental aspects of sex differences in math achievement and domain-specific motivational variables such as self-concept and interest. Using a Reciprocal Effects Model (REM), we analyzed 2,342 Germa...

Unproctored, web-based assessments are frequently compromised by a lack of control over the participants’ test taking behavior. It is likely that participants cheat if personal consequences are high. This meta-analysis summarizes findings on context effects in unproctored and proctored ability assessments and examines mean score differences and cor...

Objective: The goal of this study was to examine age-associated personality differences using a measurement-invariant representation of the higher-order structure of the Five Factor Model. Method: We reanalyzed the German NEO-PI-R norm sample (N = 11,724) and applied Ant Colony Optimization in a multi-group confirmatory factor analysis setting i...

Medical education research has focused almost entirely on the education of future physicians. In comparison, findings on other health-related occupations, such as medical assistants, are scarce. With the current study, we wanted to examine the knowledge-is-power hypothesis in a real life educational setting and add to the sparse literature on medic...