People perceive everyday situations very individually and react to them depending on their personality, lifestyle, development or a psychological disorder. In this study, an image-based method was developed to capture the perception of social situations that represent potential social conflict situations. To date, there is no comparable psychometric instrument.
Based on what we know about social conflict, the construction of the items mainly included resource conflict and conflict of interest in various social situations. Eighteen images were pre-sented as an online survey with a 7-point response scale. In addition, personality, anxiety, anger, alexithymia, and sociodemographic data were collected.
2074 participants were recruited via online portals, social media and mailing lists. Cases usable for analysis (N = 1831) included more women and more highly educated individuals.
The items and scale were tested for a Rasch model for polytomous responses with the partial credit model. After the number of response categories was reduced to 4, the item categories were ordered and fitted to the model. Person estimates showed a misfit of about 6% of cases. Model tests demonstrated the unidimensionality of the scale (Martin-Loef test) and revealed that some response categories were likely to deviate from the model (Wald-type test). The An-derson likelihood ratio test indicated model validity when smaller sample sizes were created and tested through resampling (n = 300, 400, 500). The reliability based on classical test theory was sufficient (McDonald’s ω = 0.75, N = 1973). However, the validity of the model is prelim-inary and needs to be tested empirically with a new data set without pooling of response cate-gories.
Although the model fit statistics are preliminary due to the post-hoc pooling of response cate-gories, it is proposed that the test be used to assess social cognition in the context of anticipating social conflict (ASK), preferably for research questions and theory building on the perception of conflict-prone social situations.