A Cultural Consensus Theory approach for ordinal data is developed, leading to a new model for ordered polytomous data. The model introduces a novel way of measuring response biases and also measures consensus item values, a consensus response scale, item difficulty, and informant knowledge. The...

Although latent attributes that follow a hierarchical structure are anticipated in many areas of educational and psychological assessment, current psychometric models are limited in their capacity to objectively evaluate the presence of such attribute hierarchies. This paper introduces the...

Convergence of the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm to a global optimum of the marginal log likelihood function for unconstrained latent variable models with categorical indicators is presented. The sufficient conditions under which global convergence of the EM algorithm is attainable are...