Interrelationships Among 76 Individually-Administered Tests Intended To Represent 76 Different Structure-of-Intellect Abilities and a Standardized General Intelligence Test in a Sample of 34 Nine-Year-Old Children

Abstract

For a sample of 34 nine-year-old children from a southern California middle-class suburban community both the scores of 76 individually administered structure-of-intellect (SOI) tests constructed or selected to duplicate exactly 76 hypothesized SOI abilities and the scores on the verbal (V), nonverbal (NV), and composite (C) scales of the Lorge-Thorndike Intelligence Tests (LT), Multi-Level Edition, were intercorrelated and factor analyzed to determine the extent of overlap of SOI ability measures, their degree of relationship with the LT scales, and the possible presence of second order factors among the SOI tests. Although the data revealed a range in magnitude of the 2850 correlation coefficients among the SOI measures from -.47 to .69 (median coefficient, .13), the values for the ranges and the average magnitudes of intercorrelation coefficients of SOI tests within single categories of the same operations, contents, or products dimension of the SOI model did not differ appreciably from those corresponding values and magnitudes found between categories from different SOI dimensions. In the absence of identifiable meaningful second order factors or dimensions, there was, however, the suggestion of a factor of general intellectual function in view of the high loadings of several SOI tests on the same factor as that on which the LT-V and LT-NV scales were heavily saturated. A weighted combination of eight to ten SOI ability tests could afford a potentially valid representation of the complex of functions or of the general function being measured by the LT-V and LT-NV scales.