Applying Rasch Methodology to Examine and Enhance Precision of the Baby Care Questionnaire
Quoc Cuong Truong; Merideth Gattis; Carol Cornsweet Barber; Wendy Middlemiss; Terry Kit‐fong Au; Oleg N. Medvedev; Everett V. Smith Jr.
Abstract The Baby Care Questionnaire (BCQ) is an established ordinal measure of parenting beliefs about infant care, which includes structure and attunement scales. Rasch analysis is a powerful method to examine and improve psychometric properties of ordinal scales. This study aimed to evaluate the psychometric properties and improve precision of the structure and attunement scales of the BCQ using Rasch methodology. A Partial Credit Rasch model was applied to a sample of 450 mothers from the United Kingdom ( n = 225) and New Zealand ( n = 225) who completed the BCQ. Initial analyses indicated acceptable reliability of the structure and attunement scales of the BCQ, but some items showed misfit to the Rasch model associated with local dependency issues in both scales. After combining locally dependent items into testlets, both scales of the BCQ met expectations of the unidimensional Rasc...
Quoc Cuong Truong, Merideth Gattis, Carol Cornsweet Barber, Wendy Middlemiss, Terry Kit‐fong Au, Oleg N. Medvedev, & Everett V. Smith Jr. (2024). Applying Rasch Methodology to Examine and Enhance Precision of the Baby Care Questionnaire. Journal of Child and Family Studies, 33(1), 166-178. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10826-023-02772-0