Introduction
It seems that even a major professional society devoted to Psychometrics has to explain what is meant by the term. Four contemporary scholars were asked, and their somewhat similar responses were put on the society’s website (https://www.psychometricsociety.org/content/what-psychometrics). Some explanations used Galton’s (1879) definition regarding imposing measures or numbers onto “operations of the mind,” other appear somewhat circular as they seem to define the term by quantitative psychology. This is tempting, of course, to explain something by pointing towards something else that appears to be a bit more descriptive. An example is a subtitle, more specifically the subtitle one of the leading journals in the domain uses. In this sense, psychometrics is quantitative psychology, as Psychometrika is “… a journal of quantitative psychology”. The pre-1984 subtitle of the journal suggests that the field (and journal) is “…devoted to the development of psychology as a...
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von Davier, M. (2020). Psychometrics. In: Zeigler-Hill, V., Shackelford, T.K. (eds) Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24612-3_1341
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