Psychometrics is a field of study within psychology concerned with the theory and technique of measurement. Psychometrics generally covers specialized fields within psychology and education devoted to testing, measurement, assessment, and related activities. Psychometrics is concerned with the objective measurement of latent constructs that cannot be directly observed. Examples of latent constructs include intelligence, introversion, mental disorders, and educational achievement. The levels of individuals on nonobservable latent variables are inferred through mathematical modeling based on what is observed from individuals' responses to items on tests and scales.
Louis Leon Thurstone was an American pioneer in the fields of psychometrics and psychophysics. He conceived the approach to measurement known as the law of comparative judgment, and is well known for his contributions to factor analysis. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Thurstone as the 88th most cited psychologist of the 20th century, tied with John Garcia, James J. Gibson, David Rumelhart, Margaret Floy Washburn, and Robert S. Woodworth.
Joy Paul Guilford was an American psychologist best remembered for his psychometric study of human intelligence, including the distinction between convergent and divergent production.
Mathematical psychology is an approach to psychological research that is based on mathematical modeling of perceptual, thought, cognitive and motor processes, and on the establishment of law-like rules that relate quantifiable stimulus characteristics with quantifiable behavior. The mathematical approach is used with the goal of deriving hypotheses that are more exact and thus yield stricter empirical validations. There are five major research areas in mathematical psychology: learning and memory, perception and psychophysics, choice and decision-making, language and thinking, and measurement and scaling.
Quantitative psychology is a field of scientific study that focuses on the mathematical modeling, research design and methodology, and statistical analysis of psychological processes. It includes tests and other devices for measuring cognitive abilities. Quantitative psychologists develop and analyze a wide variety of research methods, including those of psychometrics, a field concerned with the theory and technique of psychological measurement.
John Bissell Carroll was an American psychologist known for his contributions to psychology, linguistics and psychometrics.
Donna Hoffman is the Louis Rosenfeld Distinguished Scholar and Professor of Marketing at the School of Business at The George Washington University. She is the co-founder of eLab, an online laboratory for consumer behavior research and the Co-Director of the Center for the Connected Consumer.
Thomas P. Novak is the Denit Trust Distinguished Scholar and Professor of Marketing at The George Washington University School of Business, where he co-directs the Center for the Connected Consumer and the Connected Consumer Panel. Professor Novak’s research since 1993 has focused exclusively on consumer behavior in online environments and digital marketing. His current research interests deal with consumer motivations for using social media, the impact of the social web on consumer well-being, and post-social media marketing including the gamification of marketing, the Internet of Things, and the connected consumer.
The Psychometric Society is an international nonprofit professional organization devoted to the advancement of quantitative measurement practices in psychology, education, and the social sciences. The society publishes a scientific journal called Psychometrika, concentrating on the area of statistics. The society also conducts an annual scientific meeting.
Psychometrika is the official journal of the Psychometric Society, a professional body devoted to psychometrics and quantitative psychology. The journal covers quantitative methods for measurement and evaluation of human behavior, including statistical methods and other mathematical techniques. Past editors include Marion Richardson, Dorothy Adkins, Norman Cliff, and Willem J. Heiser. According to Journal Citation Reports, the journal had a 2019 impact factor of 1.959.
Ledyard R. Tucker was an American mathematician who specialized in statistics and psychometrics. His Ph.D. advisor at the University of Chicago was Louis Leon Thurstone. He was a lecturer in psychology at Princeton University from 1948 to 1960, while simultaneously working at ETS. In 1960, he moved to working full-time in academia when he joined the University of Illinois. The rest of his career was spent as professor of quantitative psychology and educational psychology at UIUC until he retired in 1979. Tucker is best known for his Tucker decomposition and Tucker–Koopman–Linn model. He is credited with the invention of Angoff method.
Kenneth A. Bollen is the Henry Rudolf Immerwahr Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Bollen joined UNC-Chapel Hill in 1985. He is also a member of the faculty in the Quantitative Psychology Program housed in the L. L. Thurstone Psychometric Laboratory. He is a fellow at the Carolina Population Center, the American Statistical Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was also the Director of the Odum Institute for Research in Social Science from 2000 to 2010. His specialties are population studies and cross-national analyses of democratization.
Dorothy Christina Adkins was an American psychologist. Adkins is best known for her work in psychometrics and education testing, particularly in achievement testing. She was the first female president of the Psychometric Society and served in several roles in the American Psychological Association.
David Michael Thissen is an emeritus professor of quantitative psychology at the University of North Carolina and former President of the Psychometric Society. He is a fellow at the American Statistical Association and the American Psychological Society.
Thelma Gwinn Thurstone was a U.S. psychologist.
Li Cai is a statistician and quantitative psychologist. He is a professor of Advanced Quantitative Methodology at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies with a joint appointment in the quantitative area of the UCLA Department of Psychology. He is also Director of the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing, Managing Partner at Vector Psychometric Group.
Bryce Byrum Reeve III is an American psychometrician, outcomes research scientist, professor of Health Policy and Management at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, and faculty expert at the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center. He is a prominent figure in quantitative research on improving the measurement of patient-reported health outcomes.
Kathleen Marie "Katie" Gates is an American neuroscientist, quantitative psychologist, and faculty member in the L. L. Thurstone Psychometric Laboratory at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is known for her contributions to network analysis, time series analysis, and structural equation modeling toward the development and dissemination of methods for quantifying intra-individual change and person-specific processes as they unfold across time.
Daniel John Bauer is an American statistician, professor, and director of the quantitative psychology program at the University of North Carolina, where he is also on the faculty at the Center for Developmental Science. He is known for rigorous methodological work on latent variable models and is a proponent of integrative data analysis, a meta-analytic technique that pools raw data across multiple independent studies.
Lyle Vincent Jones was an American psychologist known for his pioneering work in psychometrics. He was an early architect of the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
