As far as I know, item response theory is mainly used within psychology to analyse survey data, personality questionaires or in educational setting.
- Are there other areas (possibly outside of psychology) where IRT is used?
- And if so, what are they?
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2$\begingroup$ If you take into consideration that IRT is (almost) a synonym of Latent Trait analysis aka Logistic Factor analysis you'll get it that it is Factor analysis for categorical ordinal or binary data. However, other Factor analyses besides IRT exist for categorical data, most notably Optimal scaling PCA/FA and PCA/FA based on tetra- or polychoric correlations. $\endgroup$– ttnphnsAug 29, 2013 at 21:57
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1$\begingroup$ @ttnphns Thanks for your comment. It sounds like an answer to me, why don't you post it as an answer... $\endgroup$– Jens KourosAug 29, 2013 at 22:01
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3 Answers
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IRT has also been used in political science, e.g. here: http://personal.lse.ac.uk/hix/Working_Papers/Hix-Hoyland-Vivyan-EJPR2010.pdf
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IRT can be also used in marketing for modeling of brand perceptions as I recently read in this post.
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Item response theory (IRT) is most commonly applied in education and the psychological sciences. Other common applications are typically found in other social sciences like marketing, sociology, and political science (as noted by other responses to this question). One area of application outside the social sciences is machine learning and artificial intelligence. For example, Kline, Kline, & Lee (2021) use IRT to select features in machine learning models.
References
Kline, A. S., Kline, T. J., & Lee, J. (2021). Item response theory as a feature selection and interpretation tool in the context of machine learning. Medical & Biological Engineering & Computing, 59(2), 471-482.
