Psychometric scale with items in sets where responses imply a rank order of items

Question

My question is related to psychometry. One survey is measured in this way:

Question 1
Claim 1     0 1 2 3 4 5 M
Claim 2     0 1 2 3 4 5 M
Claim 3     0 1 2 3 4 5 M
Claim 4     0 1 2 3 4 5 M

There are 25 questions of this kind. Participants should choose one '0' and one 'M' and one number for every of the claims, but numbers shouldn't be the same. Results are 2 independent factors, which combined produce 4 types in profile. The theory is that those factors are independent.

My questions are:

1. Is there any literature which will explain this type of measurement?
2. How to measure alphas for this questionnaire or conduct factor analysis
3. Is there a way to see/count Pearson coefficients (or any other type of correlation) for this survey and some other which are measured in traditional way with Likert scale?

Edit: ie.

Question1:
I am calm and organized      0 1 2 3 4 5 M (My options are all of them, i choose 0)
I like to go to Gardaland    X 1 2 3 4 5 M (My options are all except 0, i choose 5)
Everyone is paranoic         X 1 2 3 4 X M (My options are 1, 2 3 4 and M, i choose 3)
My mother was a good person  X 1 2 X 4 X M (My option is M because 0 and M are mandatory)

after that there is question 2 to question 25 which follow the same format.

Answer 1

Okay. I think I finally get what you are saying. You have constructed a form of partially ipsative or forced choice scale.

In my words, I would say that you have 100 items in total. The 100 items are grouped into sets of 4 items, and you have 25 sets. Each item is rated on a 0 to 6 scale, and within each set participants need to give different responses for each item in the set. They must give a 0 and a 6.

This is a variant on the idea of rank ordering the items in a set. However, you would also get a little bit of additional individual difference information because participants are not just ranking items.

For further discussion, definitions, and a critique of ipsative tests see Johnson, Wood, and Blinkhorn (1988).

References

• Johnson, C. E., Wood, R., & Blinkhorn, S. F. (1988). Spuriouser and spuriouser: The use of ipsative personality tests. Journal of Occupational Psychology, 61(2), 153-162.