The assessment of emotional experience through inventories and check-lists can be influenced by factors that are not related to specific items’ content or to the attributes the used instrument is designed to measure. Such factors are different forms of response distortions (e.g. extreme response style) that can “contaminate” the gathered data. One way to eliminate such undesired sources of variation is the transformation of normative into ipsative data by ipsatization. It was argued that standard correlational statistical procedures are inappropriate for the analysis of ipsatized data due of their specific psychometric properties. More recently published papers concluded the opposite, that ipsative scores are equivalent substitutes for normative scores. The aim of this study was to clarify this issue by comparing the results of factor analyses performed on normative and ipsative data. For this purpose, a positive and negative affect measure was administered to 415 psychology students at the University of Zagreb. The benefits and limitations of ipsative versus normative data are discussed.

normative and ipsative scores, ipsatization, correlational procedures, factor analysis, emotion