Alan D. Mead

Assistant Professor

Office: 248A Life Sciences Building
Office hours: MTW 1:00-1:40 and by appointment
Office number: (312) 567-5933
Home office: (815) 588-3846
Fax: (217) 244-5876
Email:

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).

Recent Presentations

• 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.
• 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.

Representative Publications

• 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:

• Psychometric Theory
• Compensation and Rewards Systems
• Issues in Industrial Psychology (validity generalization, utility analysis, synthetic validity)
• Structural equations modeling (Spring 2008)

Undergraduate Classes:

• Behavioral statistics
• Research methods (Spring 2008)

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.