A generalized item response tree model for psychological assessments.

A new item response theory (IRT) model with a tree structure has been introduced for modeling item response processes with a tree structure. In this paper, we present a generalized item response tree model with a flexible parametric form, dimensionality, and choice of covariates. The utilities of the model are demonstrated with two applications in psychological assessments for investigating Likert scale item responses and for modeling omitted item responses. The proposed model is estimated with the freely available R package flirt (Jeon et al., 2014b).