Multitrait–Multimethod Matrix

In 1959, Donald T. Campbell and Donald W. Fiske published an article in the Psychological Bulletin that, approximately 30 years later, would become the most cited article in the history of the social sciences. By 1992, it had been cited more than 2,000 times by other authors, and a 2005 search of the Social Sciences Citation Index showed more than 4,000 citations. The subject of Campbell and Fiske’s article was a statistical tool known as the multitrait–multimethod matrix. A multitrait–multimethod (MTMM) matrix is a matrix of correlation coefficients computed between each pair of a set of measures (the correlation coefficients indicate how strongly each pair of measures is related).

The MTMM matrix is intended to evaluate psychological measures, helping determine how well scores on the measures ...