among other things, it gives you a theoretical way of forming a confidence interval for an individual's true score, formed by adding and subtracting 1.96 times the SEM to the person's obtained score. this assumes you want a 95% interval, of course. there are lots of variations on this theme. for example, there is such a thing as the standard error of measurement of a mean, so that you can apply the same logic to mean scores as to individual scores.
so lets say an individual gets a 60 on some instrument for which the standard error of measurement is 5. the 95% CI is roughly 50 to 70. meaning what? well, it's exactly the same interpretation as any other confidence interval, except the concept is that of the sampling distribution of a given individual's obtained scores formed by taking independent random samples of items from a domain, administering each to the individual and forming the sampling distribution with a mean equal to the person's true score and a standard deviation equal to the standard error of measurement. if we were to take each individual obtained score and form a 95% confidence interval for the true score, 95% of them would contain the true score for that individual. we are therefore 95% CONFIDENT that the particular one we have is one that contains the individual's true score. "esphinx" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>... > In what way does the standard error of measurement is related to test > interpretation? . . ================================================================= Instructions for joining and leaving this list, remarks about the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES, and archives are available at: . http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/ . =================================================================
