Language
English
Publication Date
6-4-2026
Journal
Educational and Psychological Measurement
DOI
10.1177/00131644261451487
PMID
42256210
PMCID
PMC13236714
PubMedCentral® Posted Date
6-4-2026
PubMedCentral® Full Text Version
Post-print
Abstract
Multivariate assessment profiles contain two conceptually distinct sources of variation: overall level and profile shape. Existing approaches recover some aspects of this structure, but none jointly establishes the replicability of latent pattern dimensions and provides a principled, population-referenced summary of person profile differentiation independent of overall level. We introduce the Aggregated Latent Profile Index (ALPI), a variance-weighted Euclidean distance that quantifies the degree to which an individual’s profile departs from a flat population reference within a bootstrap-validated latent profile space. ALPI is derived from the Aggregated Latent Profile Space (ALPS), a framework that combines parallel analysis with bootstrap stability diagnostics – principal angles between subspaces and Tucker’s congruence coefficients – to identify replicable latent pattern dimensions, then assembles the retained dimensions into a K-dimensional latent space through singular value decomposition, into which individuals and variables are jointly projected. In a simulation benchmark, ALPS recovered the known four-factor population structure as three replicable ipsatized pattern dimensions, confirming that the pipeline performs as intended when the true structure is known. In an application to normative WAIS–IV data (n = 900), ALPS identified a stable three-dimensional pattern space, and ALPI distinguished individuals with identical Full-Scale IQ – ranging from the 7th to the 85th percentile – on the basis of their ipsatized subtest configurations. ALPI provides assessment researchers and clinicians with a single, measurement-principled index of person profile differentiation that is grounded in replicable latent structure and independent of overall score level.
Keywords
Aggregated Latent Profile Index (ALPI), bootstrap stability, person profile measurement
Published Open-Access
yes
Recommended Citation
Se-Kang Kim, "The Aggregated Latent Profile Index: Measuring Person Profile Differentiation Within a Bootstrap-Validated Latent Profile Space" (2026). Faculty, Staff and Students Publications. 7747.
https://digitalcommons.library.tmc.edu/baylor_docs/7747