• Science of Emotion and Sensibility
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.553-564
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• 2008

Generalizability theory was employed to examine how the reliability of polygraph test is affected by the number of relevant questions, the number of repeated tests (the number of of charts), and the number of raters(scorers). The data consisted of the results of the polygraph tests administered to 31 crime suspects. The sample was drawn from the real polygraph tests based on Backster ZCT and archived by the Prosecutor's Office of the Republic of Korea. The numerical scores assigned by thirteen raters to the test charts were analyzed to determine the generalizability of the scores. The largest variance component was accounted for by the examinee factor(43.97%) and the residual variance component was 16.84% of the total variance. The variance component due to the interaction between the examinee and the chart factors was 12.17% and the variance component due to the three way interaction of the examinee, the repeated test, and the relevant question factors was 10.31%. The generalizability coefficient for the current measurement procedure as practiced by the Korean Prosecutor's Office was 0.74 which suggests that the current procedure is acceptable. However, measurement procedures with the combination of more than two relevant questions, more than three repeated tests, and more than two raters were generally found to yield generalizability coefficients larger than 0.80. Therefore, such procedures need to be considered seriously in order to significantly improve the reliability of polygraph test.