{"title":"A peculiarity in psychological measurement practices.","authors":"Mark White","doi":"10.1037/met0000731","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This essay discusses a peculiarity in institutionalized psychological measurement practices. Namely, an inherent contradiction between guidelines for how scales/tests are developed and how those scales/tests are typically analyzed. Best practices for developing scales/tests emphasize developing individual items or subsets of items to capture unique aspects of constructs, such that the full construct is captured across the test. Analysis approaches, typically factor analysis or related reflective models, assume that no individual item (nor a subset of items) captures unique, construct-relevant variance. This contradiction has important implications for the use of factor analysis to support measurement claims. The implications and other critiques of factor analysis are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":20782,"journal":{"name":"Psychological methods","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":7.6000,"publicationDate":"2025-02-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Psychological methods","FirstCategoryId":"102","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1037/met0000731","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"PSYCHOLOGY, MULTIDISCIPLINARY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
This essay discusses a peculiarity in institutionalized psychological measurement practices. Namely, an inherent contradiction between guidelines for how scales/tests are developed and how those scales/tests are typically analyzed. Best practices for developing scales/tests emphasize developing individual items or subsets of items to capture unique aspects of constructs, such that the full construct is captured across the test. Analysis approaches, typically factor analysis or related reflective models, assume that no individual item (nor a subset of items) captures unique, construct-relevant variance. This contradiction has important implications for the use of factor analysis to support measurement claims. The implications and other critiques of factor analysis are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).
期刊介绍:
Psychological Methods is devoted to the development and dissemination of methods for collecting, analyzing, understanding, and interpreting psychological data. Its purpose is the dissemination of innovations in research design, measurement, methodology, and quantitative and qualitative analysis to the psychological community; its further purpose is to promote effective communication about related substantive and methodological issues. The audience is expected to be diverse and to include those who develop new procedures, those who are responsible for undergraduate and graduate training in design, measurement, and statistics, as well as those who employ those procedures in research.