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Original Article

The Structural Validity of the Culture Fair Test Under Consideration of the Item-Position Effect

Published Online:https://doi.org/10.1027/1015-5759/a000384

Abstract. Although all four subtests of Cattell’s Culture Fair Test (CFT) claim to measure inductive reasoning as a facet of fluid intelligence, previous studies indicated surprisingly weak correlations among them. In the present study, we applied a fixed-links modeling approach on CFT-20R data of 206 participants to control for the confounding influence of the item-position effect on test performance and to reevaluate the structural validity of the CFT-20R. Controlling for the item-position effect resulted in two latent variables representing inductive reasoning for CFT-20R subtests Series and Matrices and subtests Classifications and Topologies, respectively. Given the correlation of r = .61 between these two latent variables, the structural validity of the CFT-20R proved to be better than suggested by traditional correlations between test scores.

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