Moonbear
Sep15-04, 07:41 PM
The question has come up over and over in numerous topics on intelligence: does the field of psychometrics exist outside of intelligence research?
So, I've gone on a brief adventure into the internet to find out what else is out there about psychometrics to share with PFers.
I'm starting a new thread on this because the question has been asked in numerous threads, so addressing it in one wouldn't necessarily provide the answer to all who are wondering, and it's not really on topic with any of those threads.
To begin, I did a quick google search on psychometrics and came across the site hosted by the Fordham University Applied Psychometric Society.
http://www.fordham.edu/aps/whatpsy.html
Here's a snippet of what they had to say:
Psychology is a diverse and exciting field. As pioneers in a relatively youthful science psychologists worldwide strive to improve every aspect of human life, from planning urban construction and zoning to human-computer interaction. Across all disciplines of psychology there is a common thread that unites all researchers and scientists in the field. This unifying discipline is psychometrics.
Psychometrics, being concerned with the design and analysis of research and the measurement of human characteristics, has enjoyed a history of rapid growth and development since its origins with the work of Binet in France and Spearman in England, and the earlier efforts of Galton and his anthropometric laboratory. The field of psychometrics has been the genesis of intelligence testing, personality testing, and vocational testing, and has contributed to the emergence of new approaches and methods to psychological measurement based on the demands of society and the emergence of new technology. Psychometricians have also worked collaboratively with those in the field of statistics and quantitative methods to develop improved ways to organize and analyze data. Today all psychologists who conduct research or who develop psychological measures must be concerned with psychometric issues to ensure the validity of their work. These psychometric principles provide the backbone of psychology as an objective science.
So, you ask, what else do psychometricians do, and what do they publish? To begin to answer this question, I delved into the PubMed database and searched for "psychometrics NOT intelligence"
Lo and behold, there is a vast field of research out there that deals with psychometrics and NOT intelligence (I somewhat suspected this, hence the effort to go find it).
PubMed spit out at me a mere.....26979 articles!
I'm just listing the citations of a small handful of the ones at the top of the list here to give a bit of representation of the wonderful variety of research topics using psychometrics.
Menopause. 2004 Jul-Aug;11(4):474-83.
Profile of Female Sexual Function: a patient-based, international, psychometric instrument for the assessment of hypoactive sexual desire in oophorectomized women.
McHorney CA, Rust J, Golombok S, Davis S, Bouchard C, Brown C, Basson R, Sarti CD, Kuznicki J, Rodenberg C, Derogatis L.
Arch Intern Med. 2004 Sep 13;164(16):1773-80.*
Clinical determinants of health-related quality of life in patients with irritable bowel syndrome.
Spiegel BM, Gralnek IM, Bolus R, Chang L, Dulai GS, Mayer EA, Naliboff B.
J Clin Forensic Med. 2004 Aug;11(4):189-97.
A preliminary study identifying risk factors in drop-out from a prison therapeutic community.
Miller S, Brown J, Sees C.
Psychol Rep. 2004 Jun;94(3 Pt 2):1349-60.
Suicide Resilience Inventory-25: development and preliminary psychometric properties.
Osman A, Gutierrez PM, Muehlenkamp JJ, Dix-Richardson F, Barrios FX, Kopper BA.
So, if any of these other interesting applications of psychometrics strikes your fancy, I'd love to learn more about them together with you. My only request is that we leave the study of intelligence out of this thread; there are already plenty of threads on that topic, and frankly, I'm getting bored with the redundancy.
So, I've gone on a brief adventure into the internet to find out what else is out there about psychometrics to share with PFers.
I'm starting a new thread on this because the question has been asked in numerous threads, so addressing it in one wouldn't necessarily provide the answer to all who are wondering, and it's not really on topic with any of those threads.
To begin, I did a quick google search on psychometrics and came across the site hosted by the Fordham University Applied Psychometric Society.
http://www.fordham.edu/aps/whatpsy.html
Here's a snippet of what they had to say:
Psychology is a diverse and exciting field. As pioneers in a relatively youthful science psychologists worldwide strive to improve every aspect of human life, from planning urban construction and zoning to human-computer interaction. Across all disciplines of psychology there is a common thread that unites all researchers and scientists in the field. This unifying discipline is psychometrics.
Psychometrics, being concerned with the design and analysis of research and the measurement of human characteristics, has enjoyed a history of rapid growth and development since its origins with the work of Binet in France and Spearman in England, and the earlier efforts of Galton and his anthropometric laboratory. The field of psychometrics has been the genesis of intelligence testing, personality testing, and vocational testing, and has contributed to the emergence of new approaches and methods to psychological measurement based on the demands of society and the emergence of new technology. Psychometricians have also worked collaboratively with those in the field of statistics and quantitative methods to develop improved ways to organize and analyze data. Today all psychologists who conduct research or who develop psychological measures must be concerned with psychometric issues to ensure the validity of their work. These psychometric principles provide the backbone of psychology as an objective science.
So, you ask, what else do psychometricians do, and what do they publish? To begin to answer this question, I delved into the PubMed database and searched for "psychometrics NOT intelligence"
Lo and behold, there is a vast field of research out there that deals with psychometrics and NOT intelligence (I somewhat suspected this, hence the effort to go find it).
PubMed spit out at me a mere.....26979 articles!
I'm just listing the citations of a small handful of the ones at the top of the list here to give a bit of representation of the wonderful variety of research topics using psychometrics.
Menopause. 2004 Jul-Aug;11(4):474-83.
Profile of Female Sexual Function: a patient-based, international, psychometric instrument for the assessment of hypoactive sexual desire in oophorectomized women.
McHorney CA, Rust J, Golombok S, Davis S, Bouchard C, Brown C, Basson R, Sarti CD, Kuznicki J, Rodenberg C, Derogatis L.
Arch Intern Med. 2004 Sep 13;164(16):1773-80.*
Clinical determinants of health-related quality of life in patients with irritable bowel syndrome.
Spiegel BM, Gralnek IM, Bolus R, Chang L, Dulai GS, Mayer EA, Naliboff B.
J Clin Forensic Med. 2004 Aug;11(4):189-97.
A preliminary study identifying risk factors in drop-out from a prison therapeutic community.
Miller S, Brown J, Sees C.
Psychol Rep. 2004 Jun;94(3 Pt 2):1349-60.
Suicide Resilience Inventory-25: development and preliminary psychometric properties.
Osman A, Gutierrez PM, Muehlenkamp JJ, Dix-Richardson F, Barrios FX, Kopper BA.
So, if any of these other interesting applications of psychometrics strikes your fancy, I'd love to learn more about them together with you. My only request is that we leave the study of intelligence out of this thread; there are already plenty of threads on that topic, and frankly, I'm getting bored with the redundancy.