Alan D. Mead

Assistant Professor
Institute of Psychology

Scientific Advisor
Center for Research and Service

Office: 248A Life Sciences Building
Office hours: Wed. 1:00-2:00, Thu. 4:00-5:00, and by appointment
Office number: (312) 567-5933
Home office: (815) 588-3846
Fax: (217) 244-5876
Email:

Spring 2009 I/O Brownbag schedule

My academic vita

Research Interests

I am interested primarily in three areas:

• Psychometric and methodological applications (such as differential item functioning),
• Technology's impact on HR functions (such as computerized testing or applications of computational liguistics), and
• Applications of personality theory (such as the practical predictive validity of a personality selection assessment or the relative security of personality assessments).

Representative Publications, Presentations, and Manuscripts

• Mead, A. D. (Chair; 2009). New directions in test security and cheating detection research. Invited Symposium, presented at the annual meeting of the National Council on Measurement in Education in San Diego, CA.
• Mead, A. D. (2009). Tracking stolen items using steganographic watermarking. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the National Council on Measurement in Education in San Diego, CA.
• Mead, A. D., & Kustis, G. (2009). Predicting sales performance with the 16PF Questionnaire: Global versus primary scales. Paper presented at the twenty-fourth annual meeting of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology in New Orleans, LA.
• Liao, C., & Mead, A. D. (2009). Fit of ideal-point and dominance IRT models to simulated data. Paper presented at the twenty-fourth annual meeting of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology in New Orleans, LA.
• Sowinski, D., Towler, A., & Mead, A. D. (2009). The effects of climate strength on the service chain model. Paper presented at the twenty-fourth annual meeting of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology in New Orleans, LA.
• Mead, A. D. (2009). A top ten list of measurement-related erros. Paper presented at the thirtieth annual IOOB conference in Chicago, IL.
• Cattell, H. E. P., & Mead, A. D. (2008). The sixteen personality factor questionnaire (16PF). In G.J. Boyle, G. Matthews, & D.H. Saklofske (Eds.) The SAGE Handbook of Personality Theory and Assessment: Vol 2 Personality Measurement and Testing (pp. 135-159). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
• Mead, A.D. (2008, April). A comparison of K-fold and leave-one-out cross-validation of empirical keys. Paper presented at the twenty-third annual meeting of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology in San Francisco, CA
• DeVille, J.O., Mead, A.D., & Kaufman, J.D. (2008, April). Evaluating the Equivalence of Dell's Employee Survey Across Countries and Languages. Paper presented at the twenty-third annual meeting of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology in San Francisco, CA
• Mead, A.D., Wothke, W., & Zhang, Y. (2008, March). ICL and ETIRM: Open Source IRT Estimation Software for Researchers. Workshop presented at the annual meeting of the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME) New York City, NY.
• Mead, A.D., Morris, S.B. & Blitz, D.L. (2007). Open-source IRT: A comparison of BILOG-MG and ICL features and item parameter recovery. Unpublished manuscript.
• Kaufman, J.D., Mead, A.D., Rauzi, T. & DeVille, J.O. (2007, April). An empirical investigation of the stability of employee engagement. Paper presented at the twenty-second annual meeting of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology in New York, NY.
• Soni, H., Mead, A.D., & Morris, S.B. (2007, April). A comparison of multigroup DIF methods for assessing measurement equivalence. Paper presented at the twenty-second annual meeting of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology in New York, NY.
• Mead, A. D. (2006). An introduction to multistage testing. Applied Measurement in Education, 19(3), 185-187.
• Mead, A. D. (2005). Reliability: Definitions and Estimation. In B. Everitt and D. Howell (Eds.). Encyclopedia of Statistics in Behavioral Science, vol. 4. Wiley: Chichester, UK.
• Ellis, B. B. & Mead, A. D., (2002). Item analysis: Theory and practice using classical and modern test theory. In S. G. Rogelberg (Ed), Handbook of research methods in industrial and organizational psychology. Blackwell: Malden, MA.
• Ellis, B. B. & Mead, A. D., (2000). Assessment of the measurement equivalence of a Spanish translation of the 16PF questionnaire. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 60(5), 787-807.
• Olson-Buchanan, J. B., Drasgow, F., Moberg, P. J., Mead, A. D., Keenan, P. A., & Donovan, M. A. (1998). Interactive video assessment of conflict resolution skills. Personnel Psychology, 51, 1-24.
• Drasgow, F., Levine, M., V., Tsien, S., Williams, B., Mead, A. D. (1995). Fitting polychotomous item response theory models to multiple-choice tests. Applied Psychological Measurement, 19, 143-165.
• Maydeu-Olivares, A., Drasgow, F. & Mead, A. (1994). Distinguishing among parametric item response models for polychotomous ordered data. Applied Psychological Measurement, 18, 245-256.
• Mead, A. D., & Drasgow, F. (1993). Equivalence of computerized and paper-and-pencil cognitive ability tests: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 114, 449-458.

Classes Taught

Graduate Classes:

• Psych 504: Individual and Cultural Differences
• Psych 511: Psychometric Theory
• Psych 588: Compensation and Rewards Systems
• Psych 530: Issues in Industrial Psychology (validity generalization, utility analysis, synthetic validity)
• Psych 571: Structural equations modeling

Undergraduate Classes:

• Psych 203: Behavioral statistics
• Psych 204: Research methods

Miscellaneous Links, Etc.

• On Windows computers, I use PDFCreator to create PDF output from any windows program that will print functionality.
• For creating documents, I prefer OpenOffice.org. It's free, it interoperates well with Microsoft Office, no need to install a separate equation editor, and OOo produces PDF files natively.
• For analyzing data, a free, powerful system is R. It's a free implementation of S-Plus with some additions and enhancements. The great thing about R (and S-Plus) is all the free statistical software that exists to perform different types of analyses. It's common that any new statistical procedure is published with a sample S-Plus implementation. The other great thing about R/S-Plus is the nifty and highly programmable graphics. For stuctural equations modeling, you can use Fox's sem package.
• Ph.D. students should read Eleven Steps to a Dissertation.
• If you want to calculate the significance of the difference of two selection ratios (for example, in assessing adverse impact), you may find this document and this spreadsheet handy. Also possibly this link which talks about a slightly different formulation of the z-test and some legal information.

Software

• Frank Baker's EQUATE 2.1 software to link metrics (used in DIF analyses). Frank is no longer supporting equate and gave me permission to distribute his software. THIS is the ORIGINAL software without any modifications.