Measuring Psychological Constructs

Book Description

Advances in Model-Based Approaches

More than a half-century has passed since Cronbach's distinction between the correlational and experimental approaches in psychology. Yet measurement today is not much better integrated with psychological theory than it was in the late 1950s, and many argue that the traditional psychometric model itself may have introduced constraints that have limited the integration of measurement and theory.

Measuring Psychological Constructs seeks to break through these constraints by offering conceptual alternatives to traditional item-response theory's fixed-content/multiple-choice models. This edited volume's contributors present groundbreaking explanatory approaches to model-based measurement that provide various psychological constructs with more "authentic" measures such as constructed-response tasks and performance assessment. These new explanatory approaches not only extend rigorous psychometric methods to a variety of major psychological constructs, but also have the potential to change fundamentally the nature of the constructs that are being measured.

Grounded in psychometrics and quantitative assessment, and in the history and major theoretical approaches of psychology, Measuring Psychological Constructs is aimed at students, teachers, researchers, and practitioners alike, in variety of psychology subdisciplines that include developmental and geriatric, industrial/organizational, clinical and counseling, educational, social and personality, experimental, neuropsychology, health and rehabilitation, and quantitative psychology.