Mitigating the slipping effect in polytomous scales: The Generalized Conditional Reliability Weighting (G-CRW)...

Traditional unit weighting (UW) remains ubiquitous in psychological assessment due to its simplicity, yet it assumes equal item contribution and struggles with person-item response inconsistencies, commonly known as the slipping effect. This study introduces the Generalized Conditional Reliability Weighting (G-CRW) algorithm, a parsimonious scoring method for polytomous scales that conditionally incorporates item reliability into observed scores based on a person-item congruence threshold. To evaluate its psychometric performance relative to UW, a comprehensive Monte Carlo simulation (1134 conditions, 1000 replications) and an empirical application (N = 349) using three established scales (Doomscrolling, DASS-21, AAQ-II) were conducted. Simulation results demonstrated that G-CRW yields superior explained variance ratios (EVR) and internal consistency coefficients compared to UW, particularly under normal distributions and high average factor loadings ( $\overline{\lambda }\ge 0.80$ ). Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) fit indices (CFI, TLI, SRMR) favored G-CRW under weaker loading conditions ( $\overline{\lambda }=0.40$ ), while method performance converged under highly skewed distributions due to algorithmic functional inertia. Empirical analyses showed that G-CRW scores were highly correlated with UW scores (r > .98) and preserved very similar patterns of associations with external variables, while producing selective score changes for only a subset of respondents. G-CRW provides applied researchers with a computationally efficient, open-source tool for improving psychometric indices without the stringent assumptions of full latent-variable modeling. To ensure immediate applicability and reproducibility, the proposed algorithm is implemented in the open-source WeightMyItems (available at https://cran.r-project.org/package=WeightMyItems ) R package and the user-friendly FAfA Shiny web application (available at https://cran.r-project.org/package=FAfA ).