The Self-Description Questionnaire II and Gifted Students: Another Look at Plucker, Taylor, Callahan, and Tomchin’s (1997) “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall”

Plucker, Taylor, Callahan, and Tomchin concluded that confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) of responses to the Self-Description Questionnaire (SDQ) II provided only limited support for construct validity with gifted students because of the modest fit of their CFA models. They acknowledged, however, that potential complications (e.g., their CFA models, treatment of missing data, and highly nonnormal data) meant that their conclusions may be premature. Here, the authors analyzed data from their original study (N = 376) and new data from another gifted-student program (N = 837), exploring alternative approaches to missing data and data normalization. The a priori model based on the design of the SDQII resulted in a good fit to the data for the total group, and the factor solution was invariant across the two samples of gifted students. The results strongly support the construct validity of responses to the SDQII by gifted adolescents.