Speaker

Dr. L.D. (Lisa) Wijsen
Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences
University of Amsterdam

Dr. Lisa Wijsen is a member of the Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Psychological Methods, at the University of Amsterdam. Her work centers on the history and philosophy underlying psychometrics, which has been published in outlets such as Perspectives on Psychological Science, Psychometrika, and Disputatio.

Title

Values in Psychometrics

Abstract

Measuring psychological attributes has become a very normal part of our lives. In the Netherlands, children get tested at 12 years old to help with choosing an appropriate secondary school; when we apply to jobs it is often expected to go through a wide range of psychological assessments, and when we go to a clinical psychologist it is not unusual to be given a diagnostic measurement tool such as the BDI. The role of testing and measurement in our society is often a topic of debate and can be considered a moral choice. Do we want to measure children at an early age? Is it desirable to have test scores determine whether we end up in university or not? What is the right thing to do? However, for the technical field of psychometrics, the moral dimension is less clear. In the field of psychometrics, people often work on highly complex models which often estimate individual differences based on observed scores. The language psychometricians use is strongly model- and mathematics-based, and often strongly separated from applications of psychometrics. Even though this technical work does not seem to be dependent on any type of moral value, when we look closely, we can still discern several (moral) values. In this talk, I will discuss the following four values: that individual differences are quantitative (rather than qualitative), that measurement should be objective in a specific sense, that test items should be fair, and that the utility of a model is more important than its truth. The goal of this talk is not to criticize psychometrics for supporting these values but rather to bring them into the open, and to encourage psychometricians to enter the debate on the moral dimensions of their field.