Publication Date
2020
Document Type
Dissertation/Thesis
First Advisor
Ogg, Julia A.
Degree Name
Ph.D. (Doctor of Philosophy)
Legacy Department
Department of Psychology
Abstract
The Mindful Attention Awareness Scale Adapted for Children (MAAS-C; Lawlor et al., 2014) was developed using traditional psychometric methods to measure dispositional mindfulness. The MAAS-C is based on the MAAS, which is one of the most widely used mindfulness scales (Medvedev et al., 2016). Evidence from Rasch analyses conducted on the MAAS suggested local dependence of items (Goh et al., 2015) and the need for modifications, including a rescoring algorithm (Medvedev et al., 2016). The aim of this study was to examine how the MAAS-C performs when evaluated with Rasch analysis using a sample of 406 fifth- and sixth-grade children. All 15 items on the MAAS-C worked in the same direction; the fit statistics fell within a range suitable for productive measurement (Linacre, 2020); a PCA of the residuals revealed an unpatterned distribution of residuals (Bond & Fox, 2014); and DIF was not found for any of the main grouping variables (e.g., grade, sex, SES). The items were not, however, evenly distributed, nor were they well-targeted for children with the highest levels of dispositional mindfulness. While a substantive hypothesis devised concerning item-difficulty devised for the current study was not corroborated, I demonstrated that the precision and item functioning of the MAAS-C can be improved by uniformly rescoring the response categories. Once rescored, a provided ordinal-to-interval conversion table can be used to optimize scoring on the MAAS-C.
Recommended Citation
Strissel, Daniel, "A Rasch Analysis of the Mindful attention Awareness Scale Adapted for Children" (2020). Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations. 7706.
https://huskiecommons.lib.niu.edu/allgraduate-thesesdissertations/7706
Extent
103 pages
Language
eng
Publisher
Northern Illinois University
Rights Statement
In Copyright
Rights Statement 2
NIU theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from Huskie Commons for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without the written permission of the authors.
Media Type
Text
