Rejoinder to McNeish and Mislevy: What Does Psychological Measurement Require?

Abstract

In this rejoinder to McNeish (2024) and Mislevy (2024), who both responded to our focus article on the merits of the simple sum score (Sijtsma et al., 2024), we address several issues. Psychometrics education and in particular psychometricians’ outreach may help researchers to use IRT models as a precursor for the responsible use of the latent variable score and the sum score. Different methods used for test and questionnaire construction often do not produce highly different results, and when they do, this may be due to an unarticulated attribute theory generating noisy data. The sum score and transformations thereof, such as normalized test scores and percentiles, may help test practitioners and their clients to better communicate results. Latent variables prove important in more advanced applications such as equating and adaptive testing where they serve as technical tools rather than communication devices. Decisions based on test results are often binary or use a rather coarse ordering of scale levels, hence, do not require a high level of granularity (but nevertheless need to be precise). A gap exists between psychology and psychometrics which is growing deeper and wider, and that needs to be bridged. Psychology and psychometrics must work together to attain this goal.