Abstract
It would be difficult to overstate the value and importance of measurement in nearly every aspect of society. Every time we purchase or eat food, take prescribed medicine, travel in a vehicle, use a phone or computer, or step inside a building, we place our trust in the results of measurements—and, for the most part, that trust seems well earned, and as such measurement is commonly associated with precision, accuracy, and overall trustworthiness. Against this backdrop, it seems little wonder that the human sciences have, since their inception, attempted to incorporate measurement into their activities as well. However, despite—or perhaps, to at least some extent, because of—the ubiquity of measurement-related concepts and discourse, there remains a remarkable lack of shared understanding of these concepts across (and often within) different fields, perhaps most visibly reflected in the vast array of proposed definitions of measurement itself. In addition to hampering communication across different disciplinary fields regarding shared methodological principles, such a lack of common understanding hints at the possibility that the same terms—“measurement,” “measurement result,” “measurement model,” etc.—are used with very different and possibly even incompatible meanings in different disciplines, with potentially disastrous results.
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Notes
- 1.
We use the term “human sciences” to refer to all scientific disciplines and activities concerned with the human mind and behavior, including not only psychology, but also sociology, anthropology, and disciplines of research concerned with particular activities such as education, health and medicine, economics, and organizations. Thus, the term is interpreted analogously with the term “physical sciences”, which refers to not only physics but also other disciplines concerned with physical phenomena, such as chemistry, biology, geology, and astronomy.
- 2.
We will carefully distinguish here objects, concepts for understanding objects, and terms for designating objects, and some notation will support us in this: thus, for example, measurement (no delimiters), as an object, is understood via a concept <measurement> (angular brackets) and designated in English by the term “measurement” (double quotes). See Box 2.1 for a presentation of our terminological assumptions.
- 3.
This position seems to be broadly accepted in the human sciences as well; for example, as put by Warren Torgerson, “measurement enables the tool of mathematics to be applied to science” (1958: p. 1).
- 4.
Work in the psychophysical tradition helped establish a number of relationships between physical phenomena and sensations (e.g., Fullerton & Cattell, 1892; Thurstone, 1927) that are even today still foundational for fields such as audiology.
- 5.
A more nuanced variation of this conclusion is that there are different kinds of measurement that share common properties; this was the conclusion reached in particular by Ludwik Finkelstein, who argued for a distinction between “strongly defined measurement” and “weakly defined measurement”, where the former “follows the paradigm of the physical sciences [and] is based on: (1) precisely defined empirical operations, (2) mapping on the real number line on which an operation of addition is defined, (3) well-formed theories for broad domains of knowledge”, and the latter is “measurement that [...] lacks some, or all, of the above distinctive characteristics of strong measurement” (Finkelstein, 2003: p. 42).
- 6.
- 7.
- 8.
More typically, these would be called “points”: i.e., “100 points above the mean”.
- 9.
The notation Θ[a] is introduced and explained in Footnote 15 of Chap. 2.
- 10.
As in Fig. 4.6, whose axes highlight whether measurement has been characterized as being dependent on empirical and/or mathematical constraints, respectively.
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Mari, L., Wilson, M., Maul, A. (2021). Introduction. In: Measurement across the Sciences. Springer Series in Measurement Science and Technology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65558-7_1
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