The consequences of pairing questions: Context effects in personality measurement

The effect of context on responses to questions has been a prominent focus in social and political survey research. However, little investigation of c ontext effects has been done for the measurement of psychological construct s. A measure of anger experience and expression in development uses vignett es describing interpersonal situations that provoke varying degrees of an.- er and require respondents to indicate their affective and/or expressive re sponse to the situation. In this study, the consequences of pairing the two questions for each vignette are investigated. Pairing the anger-experience and likelihood-of-expression questions changes the item's context. Item re sponse theory analysis similar to that used to detect differential item fun ctioning was performed. For some of the items, responding to a single or pa ired question affected the extremity of responses. The findings are discuss ed in terms of their implications for personality measurement.