Psychometrics
Number of Questions
From Xamplify's web site:
How can you gain an understanding of someone's psychometric profile with only a few questions?
How accurate is it going to be? With every response we get we gather a wealth of information allowing us to eliminate multiple subsequent questions. This technique (known as Item Response Theory, or ITR) has been thoroughly tested and validated in the US in other industries, is used to administer the SAT and GRE examinations, and by Human Resources departments in the screening of job applicants. It allows a computer to draw from a large bank of questions the ones that yield the most differentiating and conclusive information about a person. Our methods were developed in house by the world's leading psychometricians (and IRT experts), Dr. Niels Waller of Vanderbilt University, and Dr. Steven Reise of UCLA.
My Comments: For Xamplify's major trial customer, one whose data I analyzed, the online survey was conducted on about 10,000 individuals. Instead of computer drawing "from a large bank of questions the ones that yield the most differentiating and conclusive information about a person" each and every one of those 10,000 individuals got the same set of 10 questions. These questions measured one major psychological trait per question.
How can you be sure that the questions asked will yield the most valuable information for a client?
The questions are designed by our psychometric experts to be incisive; by asking pointed, value-oriented questions, we gain a much deeper understanding much more rapidly than the more conventional approaches used by our competitors. Also, the questions are designed through a semantic ontology that determines several layers of information besides the explicitly asked information in the "lingo" and relevant metrics of our client's domain.
My Comments: "The questions are designed through a semantic ontology that determines several layers of information besides the explicitly asked information in the "lingo" and relevant metrics of our client's domain." I saw the questions and I will paraphrase one of those questions: "Do you compare prices before buying?" I fail to see any incisiveness, or several layers of information. English is not my native language, though and I might have failed to see "several layers of information."
1. Xamplify's Web Page of July 22, 2001