© 2006 The Author(s).
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Improving psychometric methods in health education and health behavior research
1 Department of Pediatrics, Centre for Community Child Health Research, University of British Columbia, L408, 4480 Oak Street, Vancouver, BC V6H 3V4 Canada
2 Graduate School of Education, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA
3 Children's Nutrition Research Center, Department of Pediatrics, Baylor College of Medicine, 1100 Bates Street, Houston, TX 77030, USA
4 National Cancer Institute, Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences, Behavioral Research Program, Health Promotion Research Branch, Bethesda, MD 20892-7335, USA
* Correspondence to: L. C. Mâsse. E-mail: lmasse@cw.bc.ca
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The articles in this supplement to Health Education Research grew out of discussions among the coeditors as to the best way to further promote the use of advanced psychometric methods in health education and health behavior research. Item response modeling (IRM), also referred to as item response theory, is well established and widely implemented in educational measurement, but its application is lagging in our area. A number of issues seem to stunt the application of IRM methods: (i) few IRM applications have been presented in the context of health education and health behavior research; (ii) lack of awareness as to what IRM can do beyond assessing the psychometric properties of a scale; (iii) lack of psychometricians trained in our field; (iv) current software is not user friendly and (v) few training opportunities are available to researchers in our area. In an attempt to address