Acquiescent responding in partially balanced multidimensional scales.

We propose a method for controlling acquiescent response in which acquiescence response variance is isolated in an independent factor. This kind of procedure is available for perfectly balanced scales (i.e. half of the items are worded in the opposite direction to the other half with respect to a general trait). However, few questionnaires are designed so that exactly half of the items are worded in this way. If this is not the case, the available methods are useless. We propose to adapt the rotation method of Lorenzo-Seva and Rodríguez-Fornells to handle partially balanced scales (i.e. only a few items in the scale are worded in the opposite direction). The most important characteristic of our method is that it removes the variance due to acquiescent response from all the items in the questionnaire (i.e. the balanced subset of items, but also the unbalanced subsets of items). The usefulness of the method is illustrated in a numerical example.