Perspectives on Psychometrics Interviews with 20 Past Psychometric Society Presidents

Abstract

In this article, we present the findings of an oral history project on the past, present, and future of psychometrics, as obtained through structured interviews with twenty past Psychometric Society presidents. Perspectives on how psychometrics should be practiced vary strongly. Some presidents are psychology-oriented, whereas others have a more mathematical or statistical approach. The originally strong relationship between psychometrics and psychology has weakened, and contemporary psychometrics has become a diverse and multifaceted discipline. The presidents are confident psychometrics will continue to be relevant but believe psychometrics needs to become better at selling its strong points to relevant research areas. We recommend for psychometrics to cherish its plurality and make its goals and priorities explicit.

“The art of imposing measurement upon the mind”: Sir Francis Galton and the genesis of the psychometric paradigm

“…Some psychometricians (e.g., Humphry, 2013; Sijtsma, 2012a, 2012b), alarmed by this imbalance, have called for restoration of psyche ’s side, but ever since Spearman’s (1923) token attempts to underwrite ability testing with cognitive theory, such voices vainly cry out in a wilderness of metrics . As Paul Holland, a past president of the Psychometric Society, admitted, “I keep thinking of psychometrics as being part of statistics, not so much ‘psycho.’ Even though the guys that invented the field all came from psychology” (as quoted in Wijsen & Borsboom, 2021, p. 335). The psyche side of psychometrics is now nigh invisible 70 while the metrics side dazzles consumers.…”

Values in Psychometrics

“…Although psychometricians have become more conscious of the possible unfairness in testing as illustrated by the many examples of tools to investigate fairness of tests, this has not led to a rejection of testing as such. Actually, the opposite is the case: Standardized testing, now including methods for calculating some statistic that detects possibly biased items, is still considered one of psychometrics’ main contributions to society ( Wijsen, 2021 ). A society that is not aware of the problems of fairness in testing, or worse, a society that does not endorse testing at all, is not aware of the danger of its alternatives.…”

Replicable quality across every channel: the Busara research agenda on methods in the Global South

“…When it comes to in-person data collection, recent methodological literature has been as varied as the many methods that domain contains, but it has included debates about the interpretation of interviews and ensuring rigor in qualitative data collection (Hughes et al, 2020;Hammersley, 2020;Edwards & Holland, 2020;Jenner & Myers, 2019), interrogating the unstructured interactions around quantitative data collection (Ongena & Dijkstra, 2020;Schaeffer, 2020;Conrad & Schober, 2020;Ting & Fitzgerald, 2019), reflections on positionality and the identities of researchers (Islam, 2020;Rogers, 2020;Pritchard, 2019), and how differences between researchers and participants may be overcome in order that all sections of the population are included (Brooks et al, 2019;Kianersi et al, 2019;Kruger et al, 2019;Mao & Feldman, 2019), as well as the role of psychometrics (Wijsen & Borsboom, 2021). Only a handful of the papers cited in the preceding two paragraphs are focused on populations in the Global South.…”