Although hundreds of published and unpublished personality scales, questionnaires, and inventories have been developed since World War II, relatively little formal exposition is available concerning the steps involved in item analysis. It is felt that this situation has been compounded by past adherence to a strictly rational or empirical construction schema, since each has implied that only certain statistical item-analytic techniques are appropriate. At its extreme, rational scale construction has involved only a few agreed upon steps: (a) select and define a construct of interest, (b) write a series of items which appear on the surface to be tapping the construct, and (c) put the test into practice, perhaps attempting to differentiate criterion groups on the basis of obtained score. In many instances, only the most rudimentary item-analytic procedures, if any, have been used.