Scale items sharing a distinct thematic content inflate shared variance

Evidence

Specifically, these items were the only items in the scale that were explicitly themed on death. This overestimation suggests that the items may be redundant. Although item redundancy can be undesirable, it is a tolerable characteristic of scales (see DeVellis, 1991, p. 56). — Sherman A. Lee, Chelsea A. Reid, Stephen D. Short, Jeffrey A. Gibbons, Ruth Yeh, and Matthew L. Campbell, Fear of Muslims, 65

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the construct-validity literature on method effects (Podsakoff et al., 2003) — item wording and theme as sources of spurious covariance. — connects to: Treating Likert responses as interval data distorts estimates when aggregating across disparate items — Ruiqian Li and Paul Froese, The Duality of American Christian…, 96