Measuring Feeling of Knowing: Comment on Schraw (1995)

✍ Scribed by Daniel B. Wright

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1996
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 491 KB
• Volume: 10
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0888-4080
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1099-0720(199606)10:3<261::aid-acp387>3.0.co;2-0

✦ Synopsis

Schraw compares two coefficients for the 2 x 2 contingency tables resulting from many feeling of knowing (FOK) studies: Hamann's coefficient and Goodman and Kruskal's y. He favours Hamann's coefficient and gives examples where Hamann's coefficient produces what might be considered the more intuitive result. Further scrutiny reveals that these examples are not as convincing as Schraw makes them out to be. Because Hamann's coefficient depends on the row and column marginals, it does not map onto FOK ability as well as Goodman and Kruskal's y, which is a direct measure of the diagnostic worth of FOK ratings.

'Consider the following real world example. In some villages in India people often go to spiritual healers for a 'cure' when bitten by a snake (there is a shortage of medical doctors in the villages). In most cases the person gets better (most of the snakes are not particularly poisonous) and therefore HC would be positive.