May 2019

Closing the gap between primary and secondary psychometric literature

Throughout this research project, I have been reading and writing about psyhometric theory and trying to clearly establish my own understanding of what the YP-CORE intends and manages to measure. I think that most would agree that psychometrics is not a unified field of study. Perhaps it is best defined as a library of techniques, ideas and approaches to measurement. This can make writing about it difficult. I have often felt a bit bewildered upon being confronted with a wide and varied array of concepts, argument and epistemologies. Even in terms of reliability, validity and models of measurement, which most can agree are central to psychometrics, there is no clear, unified approach. One of the areas of literature I have been most drawn towards is the 'secondary' psychometric literature. As opposed to the primary literature, with development and validation articles of specific measures, these papers comprise exploratory, critical commentary on psychometrics, often from an epistemological point of view. For example, Michell (2005, 2008) has published largely on the representational theory of measurement and the fundamental challenge this poses for the field of psychometrics. Such literature can be incredibly interesting and valuable to psychometricians, but it seems somewhat esoteric and inaccessible. Is there an attitude in the field that there is a certain luxury to being critical without having the responsibility of developing usable measures? How can we make the philosophical/epistemological liteature on measurement more accessible so that it can be of more use to psychometricians and social scientists, in practice?