"The Rasch model, named after Georg Rasch, is a psychometric model for analyzing categorical data, such as answers to questions on a reading assessment or questionnaire responses, as a function of the trade-off between (a) the respondent's abilities, attitudes or personality traits and (b) the item difficulty. For example, they may be used to estimate a student's reading ability, or the extremity of a person's attitude to capital punishment from responses on a questionnaire."@en .