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Monday, January 31, 2011

Current consensus

The current consensus
After decades of debate, Carroll (1993) and the American Psychological Association Task Force on Intelligence (1996) concluded that there is now a strong consensus among psychometricians that the inclusion of a g factor leads to a better factor structure when attempting to interpret findings obtained from ability testing. This outcome is partly based on the fact that Thurstone’s ‘primary mental abilities’ themselves correlate with each other. The same is true for Horn and Cattell’s crystallized and fluid intelligence. This allows these constructs to be factor-analysed, in turn producing a general factor (i.e. a factor that all the original tests are correlated with) – something that Thurstone himself acknowledged.

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