The Effect of Inapplicable Item Responses on the Structure of Behavioral Checklist Data: A Cautionary Note

In recent years, researchers from varied disciplines have come to rely on behavioral checklists for the assessment of behavior and personality processes. Although checklist items of specific behavioral content are often irrelevant or inapplicable to subgroups of respondents, response categories designed specifically to measure this factor are often conspicuously absent from inventory protocols. A Monte Carlo simulation was conducted to investigate the effect of inapplicable item responses on the structure of behavioral checklist data. Results indicate that the presence of a small to moderate percentage of inapplicable item responses can seriously obfuscate data analyses.