Passing Reference To Object To Another Object?

I know just enough javascript to be dangerous, I created a 5 star rater for pages, which is set up something like this:

Code:
var starRater=function(id){
// get latest rating info from server, write into "id" div, etc
}
//later in code...
var rating=new starRater("rating");

Over the course of development I added a comment section, page visit count and so forth, and ended up with redundant code and a lot of calls to the server. I thought instead I would make one initial call and then initialize the elements with the information returned.

To be able to call the initialize function on these elements, I need some reference to them. I could call them directly, as in the example above I could call rating.init(), but I'd have to know what variable name was given to it. Instead I was thinking I'd pass some sort of reference to the object, but that doesn't seem to be working.

[Code]...

In the code above I get undefined for raterElem.testVar. Obviously I'm missing something. What am I doing wrong?