Abstract
The principal objective of the study was to develop a procedure for overcoming the effects of differential skewness of test items in scale construction. It was shown that the degree of skewness of test items places an upper limit on the correlations between the items, regardless of the contents of the items. If the items are ordered in terms of skewness the resulting intercorrelation matrix forms a simplex or a pseudo simplex. Factoring such a matrix results in a multiplicity of factors, most of which are artefacts. A procedure for overcoming this problem was demonstrated
with items from the Locus of Control Inventory (Schepers, 1995). The analyses were based on a sample of 1662 firstyear
university students.