Je. Mccarroll et al., Are respondents who omit conflict tactics scale items more violent than those who omit none? A methodological note, J INTERP V, 15(8), 2000, pp. 872-881
In a study of 31,801 active-duty Army military men and women, the authors e
ncountered protocols in which moderate or severe Conflict Tactics Scale (CT
S) items had been omitted Dropping respondents who omit items could introdu
ce biases into the data. We investigated the hypothesis that those responde
nts who omitted an item differed in aggression from those who omitted none
and hence should not be dropped from the analysis without further considera
tion. We tested this by means of three comparisons of those who omitted one
item and those who omitted none: classification of respondents into no agg
ression, moderate aggression, and severe aggression; differences between me
an CTS scores; and comparison of one-time aggressors with those who reporte
d more than one incident in a year. All three methods indicated that the gr
oup that omitted one item was more aggressive than the group that omitted n
one.