Psychometrics

Introduction

One can scarcely describe psychometric theory and practice without unearthing the history of the discipline of psychology itself. That is to say, the history of psychometrics is tied in important ways to the history of psychology as an independent discipline, as it was largely the promise of subsuming inquires of a psychological nature under a natural science rubric – complete with its quantitative methods – that opened the door for psychology to formally break from philosophy. Moreover, the relationship between substantive psychological theory and psychometric theory has historically been closely entangled, and the two have mutually informed and constrained one another as they have developed over the past century, one consequence of which is that the concept of “psychometrics” extends widely. It refers not only to a body of psychological measurement theory but also to a wide array of methods, instruments, and procedures that are applicable in a broad range of contexts –...