Simplicity Above Elegance: Another Look at the Asymptotically Correct Standardization of Snijders

Abstract

Person-fit statistics are widely used to detect aberrant response patterns in educational and psychological measurement. Snijders (2001) suggested an asymptotically correct standardization for a broad class of such statistics. This paper presents an alternative derivation of this standardization. The derivation yields several advantages including a simpler formula and simpler description of several person-fit statistics including the lz* statistic (van Krimpen-Stoop & Meijer, 1999) and a theoretical explanation of simulation findings reported by Snijders (2001) and van Krimpen-Stoop and Meijer (1999), among others.