An Ordinal Item Response Model for Understanding Attitudes

Mauerer, Ingrid und Tutz, Gerhard (2025): An Ordinal Item Response Model for Understanding Attitudes. In: Sociological Methods & Research [Forthcoming]

Abstract

We present an item response model for ordinal public opinion data to understand individual-level variation in attitudes as a function of covariates. The approach allows investigating how individuals (or population subgroups) differ in substantive stances and attitude strength. It is a two-dimensional partial credit model that incorporates covariates linked to attitude direction and strength into the basic model. We exemplify the types of substantive insights into heterogeneity that can be obtained from the approach but not from existing models with two applications: attitudes toward gender equality (European Values Study) and the evaluation of presidential candidates (American National Election Study).

• Item Type: Journal article
• Keywords: public opinion; attitudes; individual-level variation; item response theory; ordinal responses
• Faculties: Mathematics, Computer Science and Statistics > Statistics; Mathematics, Computer Science and Statistics > Statistics > Chairs/Working Groups > Seminar for Applied Stochastic
• Subjects: 300 Social sciences > 300 Social sciences, sociology and anthropology; 300 Social sciences > 310 Statistics
• ISSN: 1552-8294
• Language: English