The ambiguous utility of psychometrics for the interpretative foundation of socially relevant avatars

Abstract

Accepted for publication in Theory & PsychologyInternational audienceThe persisting debates that measurement in psychology elicits can be explained by the conflict between two aspiration types. One, the epistemologic aspiration, resting on the search for scientific truth, and two, the social aspiration, resting on the demonstration of a capacity to contribute to psychological assessment problems in particular. Psychometrics answer essentially to psychology's demand for social utility, leading to the quasi-exclusive attribution of importance to quantitative interpretation. For psychology to be considered an empirical science, it has to establish its capacity for the measurement of psychological phenomena, even if this means that it recognizes that these phenomena are essentially qualitative

Measuring Unobserved Variables in Educational Inequality Research: Mathematics and Language 'Abilities' in Early Childhood

“…Third, serious epistemological criticisms of the use of psychometric scaling models to measure cognitive constructs abound. For an overview of literature discussing psychometrics as an entirely or partly pathological science, see H. Johnson (1936), Michell (1997), Michell (2008), Trendler (2013), Trendler (2009), Humphry (2013), Mari et al (2017), Maul, Irribarra, and Wilson (2016), Briggs (2013), Vautier et al (2012) and E. Lacot, Afzali, and Vautier (2016), among others. In a nutshell, these criticisms relate to two characteristics of standardized tests.…”

“…In the psychometric framework of item response theory (IRT), cognitive abilities-for example, mathematics ability-together with the structures and functions of the brain indicative of a more mathematically able child are presumed to lie on a [0, max] range; where 0 corresponds to no ability and max corresponds to maximum mathematics ability. Test scores, which have their own arbitrary scales, should map onto the hypothesized range of mathematics ability in the brain in a nondecreasing functional relation (Vautier et al (2012)). Such evidence has not been provided by test developers.…”

Puzzle-solving in psychology: The neo-Galtonian vs. nomothetic research focuses

“…If applied psychologists are to be serving the social demand by proposing better expectations, they cannot argue that their better expectations are valid when applied to single cases. In the domain of psychological assessment, we contend that the P 1 -paradigm allows researchers interested in satisfying the social demand through psychological measurements (or index-numerology according to Johnson, 1943) to establish that quantitative psychological attributes can be measured because measurement is possible without deterministic laws-even without partially deterministic laws (for a more detailed discussion, see Vautier et al, 2012).…”

“…Actually, the normal distribution of E is a crude and logically unsuitable approximation because M (Y ) is bounded and discrete (e.g., a test scale is a finite numerical series, see Vautier et al, 2011Vautier et al, , 2012. The crucial point is that the random variable is defined in such a way that its range of possible values is unrestricted, that is, it implies no impossible values in M (Y ).…”

Additive conjoint measurement and the resistance toward falsifiability in psychology

“…But avoiding any tests of quantitative measurement but applying methods making the assumption of quantity appears to be nothing more than a self-delusion that one bears something valuable instead of being in fact empty-handed. This all too strong tendency to avoid falsification is probably deeply rooted in the scientifically unhealthy political/economical aspiration of psychology (Vautier et al, 2012) which keeps the machine for paper-producing and grant-funding well-oiled but also leading to a severe publication bias. Consider Levine et al (2009) who showed that effect size and sample size are negatively correlated in 80% of meta-analyses.…”