Adjustments to the correction for attenuation.

Abstract

With respect to the often-present covariance between error terms of correlated variables, D. W. Zimmerman and R. H. Williams's (1977) adjusted correction for attenuation estimates the strength of the pairwise correlation between true scores without assuming independence of error scores. This article focuses on the derivation and analysis of formulas that perform the same function for partial and part correlation coefficients. Values produced by these formulas lie closer to the actual true-score coefficient than do the observed-score coefficients or those obtained by using C. Spearman's (1904) correction for attenuation. The new versions of the formulas thus allow analysts to use hypothetical values for error-score correlations to estimate values for the partial and part correlations between true scores while disregarding the independence-of-errors assumption.