The IRTree technique permits researchers to disentangle response styles from thesubstantive trait by modeling the content-relevant and -irrelevant factors as separatenodes in the tree. This feature empowers the researchers to differentiate those respondentswho carry a response style from those who do not. For example, following thetree structure in Figure 3, it is possible to distinguish a respondent with extremelyhigh self-esteem but no extreme response style (Respondent A) from another respondentwith a high level of self-esteem and an extreme response style (say, preferringextreme responses in both trait directions; Respondent B). These two respondentscould have the same response to an item (SD or SA), hence follow the same path inthe tree structure. However, Respondent A would be estimated to have a higher scoreon utrait direction, compared to Respondent B. On the contrary, Respondent B would beestimated to have a higher score on the extreme response style factors(uextremityðlow traitÞ, uextremityðhigh traitÞ), compared to Respondent A. However, it shouldbe noted that the IRTree models would not be able to distinguish these two respondentsif they have exactly the same responses to all the items.