Fumiko Samejima

Fumiko Samejima (1930–c2021) was a prominent Japanese-born psychometrician best known for her development of the Graded Response Model (GRM), a fundamental approach in Item Response Theory (IRT). Her innovative methods became influential in psychological and educational measurement, particularly in improving the accuracy of tests involving Likert-scale questions and other graded responses. She published her seminal paper “Estimation of Latent Ability Using a Response Pattern of Graded Scores” in 1969. This publication became a foundational reference in psychometric literature, significantly advancing the analysis of ordered categorical data.

Fumiko served as President of the Psychometric Society (1996-1997). She also received various awards during her life including Outstanding Technical Contribution from the National Council on Measurement in Education (1991).

Biography Fumiko Samejima was born on December 25, 1930, in Tokyo, Japan. She developed a strong interest in mathematics while at Jo-koshi Fuzoku High School. After a year of studying math in college, she transferred to Keio University. There, a research study on twins and the ongoing nature versus nurture debate piqued her interest, prompting her to switch her major to psychology and apply for graduate school.

Samejima felt disillusioned with psychology, as it did not seem scientific enough to her. This changed after she read Frederic Lord's 1952 monograph on psychometrics, which was her first exposure to latent trait theory. This theory posits that individuals can be evaluated through test items designed to measure underlying traits, such as intelligence. Her renewed enthusiasm for mathematics rekindled her interest in psychometrics, leading her to study under Tarow Indow, a prominent cognitive scientist. Together, they co-wrote a book on non-verbal reasoning, "On the Results Obtained by the Absolute Scaling Model and the Lord Model in the Field of the Intelligence". Samejima earned her Ph.D. in psychology from Keio University in 1965. Samejima then took a job at Bowling Green State University in 1970, while there she published another significant paper, “A General Model for Free Response Data”. She then accepted a full professor position at the University of Tennessee Knoxville in 1973.

Beyond this seminal contribution, Samejima authored numerous influential articles in academic journals, focusing on the extension of Item Response Theory, differential item functioning, and test information functions. Her rigorous, mathematically detailed publications remain core readings in the field of psychometric analysis.

Awards

Outstanding Researcher Award from Behaviormetric Society in Japan (2007) Outstanding Technical Contribution to the Field of Educational Measurement from the National Council on Measurement in Education (1991)

Representative publications

Samejima, F. (1969). Estimation of latent ability using a response pattern of graded scores. Psychometrika Monograph Supplement, 17(4), 1-68. Samejima, F. (1972). A general model for free-response data. Psychometrika Monograph Supplement, 37(1, Pt. 2), 68. Samejima, F. (1974). Normal ogive model on the continuous response level in the multidimensional latent space. Psychometrika, 39(1), 111-121. Samejima F. (1979). A new family of models for the multiple choice item (Research Rep. No. 79-4). Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee. Samejima, F. (1995). Acceleration model in the heterogeneous case of the general graded response model. Psychometrika, 60(4), 549–572.

Books and Book Chapters

Indow, T., & Samejima, F. (1966). On the Results Obtained by the Absolute Scaling Model and the Lord Model in the Field of the Intelligence. Psychological laboratory on the Hiyoshi campus, Keio University. Samejima, F. (1997). Graded Response Model. In: van der Linden, W.J., Hambleton, R.K. (eds) Handbook of Modern Item Response Theory. Springer, New York, NY. Samejima, F. (2011). The general graded response model. In: M. L. Nering & R. Ostini (Eds.), Handbook of polytomous item response theory models (pp. 87–118). Routledge. Sammejima, F. (2016). Graded response models. In: van der Linden, W.J. (Ed.). (2016). Handbook of Item Response Theory: Volume 1: Models (1st ed.). Chapman and Hall/CRC.