Cherry-picking scale items can inflate apparent construct validity

Evidence

You can, if you choose the items carefully, get an appreciably stronger relationship between a miniversion of a scale and some target variable of interest than you could with the scale as a whole. It will then appear to the uncritical reviewer that the construct validity of the test as a whole has been splendidly verified. (This is an old trick, but it apparently still works.) Another potential “sleight of hand” maneuver involves using just the items with the best intercorrelations on the test. This also ignores the probability that those items no longer faithfully represent the construct for which the test was conceived and named. — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 3949

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains the ‘miniversion trick’ and ‘sleight of hand maneuver’ as research-practice devils.
• SEED: Essay angle: a field guide to the unconscious and deliberate ways psychologists inflate construct validity.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 3949
• XREF: connects to: Combining exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis produces theory-driven results robust across samples — Ruiqian Li and Paul Froese, The Duality of American Christian…, 94