Theories and Concepts
Psychometrics
Also Known As Psychological Testing
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Psychometrics is the field within psychology concerned with the theory and technique of measuring psychological attributes that cannot be directly observed, such as intelligence, personality and aptitude. Francis Galton, often called its father, pioneered mental testing of individual differences in his 1869 Hereditary Genius; James McKeen Cattell extended this work and coined the term mental test. Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon produced the first widely adopted intelligence scale in France in 1905, later Americanized as the Stanford-Binet by Lewis Terman. Charles Spearman's 1904 discovery that scores on unrelated cognitive tests correlate positively, the positive manifold, led him to propose a single general intelligence factor, g, and David Wechsler's later scales became the field's dominant clinical instruments.
Facts
Disputed
Core ClaimStandardized psychological tests can validly and reliably quantify mental traits such as general intelligence, and the resulting scores meaningfully predict real-world outcomes such as academic and occupational performance. 1 Genuinely disputed: critics, Stephen Jay Gould foremost among them, hold that intelligence testing's claim to culturally neutral, objective measurement cannot be separated from the field's own historical entanglement with eugenics and from unresolved questions about what its scores actually capture. See the dissent on this fact. Cross-Tradition Connections
Sources
1. Wikipedia: Psychometrics
Wikimedia FoundationHistorical Development sectionQuote, Historical Development section
Francis Galton, often called 'the father of psychometrics,' published Hereditary Genius in 1869 and pioneered the use of mental tests to measure individual differences in abilities like sensory and motor functioning.
1. Wikipedia: Psychometrics
Wikimedia FoundationBias and Validity Controversy sectionQuote, Bias and Validity Controversy section
Critics increasingly question the assumption that intelligence can be measured as a culturally neutral and objective biological trait.
1. Wikipedia: Psychometrics
Wikimedia FoundationEarly Intelligence Scales sectionQuote, Early Intelligence Scales section
One early approach to measuring intelligence was the test developed in France by Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon.
1. Wikipedia: Psychometrics
Wikimedia FoundationDefinition sectionQuote, Definition section
Psychometrics is a field of study within psychology concerned with the theory and technique of measurement.
1. Wikipedia: Psychometrics
Wikimedia FoundationIn Branch: Cognitive Psychology, Lead sectionQuote, In Branch: Cognitive Psychology, Lead section
Psychometrics is a field of study within psychology concerned with the theory and technique of measurement.
Wikipedia: G Factor (Psychometrics)
Wikimedia FoundationOpen Questions: Does Spearman's g reflect a genuine unitary cognitive ability, or is it a statistical artifact of overlapping mental processes?View the Source Wikipedia: Quantitative Psychology
Wikimedia FoundationIn Branch: Quantitative Psychology, Lead sectionQuote, In Branch: Quantitative Psychology, Lead section
develop and analyze a wide variety of research methods, including those of psychometrics, a field concerned with the theory and technique of psychological measurement.
Open Questions (1 open question)
Does Spearman's g reflect a genuine unitary cognitive ability, or is it a statistical artifact of overlapping mental processes?
Spearman's own model of a single general factor and rival sampling-theory models, which explain the same positive correlations among test scores as an artifact of overlapping mental processes rather than one underlying capacity, are statistically indistinguishable from the correlational data alone.
What would resolve this Evidence that does not depend on the same correlational test-score structure both rival models already fit equally well, for example converging biological or neurological findings for a single general capacity distinct from a bundle of overlapping specific processes.
Wikipedia: G Factor (Psychometrics)
Dissenting Readings (1 dissenting reading)
Core Claim
Gould argued that psychometricians reified the g factor into an ineluctable 'thing' that provided a convenient explanation for test-score correlations, rather than treating it as one statistical model among others equally consistent with the data. More broadly, critics in this tradition hold that intelligence testing's claim to culturally neutral, objective measurement cannot be separated from the field's own historical entanglement with eugenics, since its founding theorists, Galton, Spearman and Terman among them, were themselves eugenics advocates whose assumptions shaped the earliest theories of what the tests were measuring.
A dissenting reading, from Stephen Jay GouldWikipedia: G Factor (Psychometrics), Wikimedia Foundation
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