WAIS-R ITEM DIFFICULTIES WITH PSYCHIATRIC-INPATIENTS

Item difficulties for 10 WAIS-R subtests were determined for a sample ot psychiatric inpatients (N = 150). Spearman correlation coefficients between psychiatric inpatient and standardization group rank orders w ere large and significant across all subtests except Object Assembly, which demonstrates the expected trend of increasing item difficulty fo r the psychiatric inpatient sample. Using linear regression, items wit h standardized residuals greater than two were judged to be significan tly out of order for the psychiatric inpatient sample. Of the 165 WAIS -R items examined in this study, only 7 were found to be out of order. This result may have been due to chance and suggests that, in general , WAIS-R subtest item difficulty curves for psychiatric inpatients and the WAIS-R standardization group are comparable.