Measuring self-stability: A methodological note

This paper brings together three major measures of the concept of self-stability, namely, the discrepancy measure, the syndromatic measure, and the longitudinal measure, and assesses their relative strengths as well as weaknesses. It is found that the discrepancy measure is incompatible with the conceptual definition of self-stability. For the remaining two, the syndromatic measure is very likely to be contaminated by social desirability effect, whereas the longitudinal measure fails to take into consideration the fluctuation during the interim between test occasions. It is suggested that the longitudinal measure may be used to check the degree of social desirability effect of the syndromatic measure.