ATLANTA—Georgia State University Presidential Fellow Ari David Fodeman to receive his PhD in Psychology, having successfully defended his dissertation “Power to the People: Testing for Measurement Invariance Across Integrated Radicalism Research.”
Radicalism, extremism, and related phenomena have been measured myriad ways, with little standardization. The most widely used metric—the Activism and Radicalism Intentions Scales (the ARIS: Moskalenko & McCauley, 2009)—has been translated, rescaled, reworded, reorganized, and used with populations never originally tested or necessarily intended for, with little scrutiny. To support the ARIS’s use across the past decade of research, Fodeman tested for Measurement Equivalence/ Invariance (ME/I), or potential bias in the measurement of radicalism across the past decade’s use of the ARIS. Fodeman did so via Integrated Data Analysis (IDA)–an approach similar to, but more powerful than, meta-analysis. Among the comparable studies, Fodeman did not detect any significant bias. Indeed, the only significant difference between comparable studies was a significantly higher radicalism score for Decker and Pyrooz’s (2019) sample–the only criminal sample across all bodies of research with the ARIS. This was not unexpected, as radicalism is commonly associated with criminality. While this work gives some credence to the use of the ARIS across multiple contexts, more in-depth analyses with larger sample sizes will have to test for ME/I between cross-classified cohorts (e.g., by translation, country, age group, general vs. specific vs. at risk populations, etc.), activism, and other radicalism items. When advanced statistical techniques such as Moderated Non-Linear Factor Analysis (MNLFA) are further developed, future studies will also have to test for ME/I across rescaling of ARIS items, likely requiring a bridging study in which multiple scales are given to the same participants. It is this type of intensive, rigorous data collection and statistical analysis found in medicine, education, and other content areas to which we radicalism researchers can aspire.
Fodeman earned an M.A. in Government from The Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya (IDC) with an emphasis on Conflict Resolution, Counter-Terrorism and Political Psychology. Fodeman also earned two Bachelor of Art degrees from American University in 2014. He received his first B.A. in Psychology and another in International Relations.