importance and scaling Flashcards
what is psychometrics?
the science concerned with evaluating the attributes of psychological tests
what are the attributes of psychometrics?
reliability and validity
what rolls does psychological measurement play?
deciding which test to use, interpreting scores and creating tests
what is a psychological construct?
an unobservable hypothetical entity that is used to represent a pattern of psychologically related phenomena
how can the nature of constructs be ascertained?
through the inference of behaviours theorised to be indirect representations of the psychological construct of interest
what is the definition of a psychological test?
a systematic procedure for comparing the behaviour of two or more people
what are criterion referenced tests?
used in contexts where a decision must be made about someones skill level
what do criterion referenced tests involve?
a cut off score that specifies whether someone has achieved a skill
what are norm referenced tests?
involve comparing a persons score with that of a reference sample
what is a reference sample?
a representative of the population of interest
what is scaling?
concerns the way in which numerical values are assigned to psychological attributes
what do the categories need to be in testing?
mutually exclusive and exhaustive
what is ranking?
a prototypical example of the property of order
what are properties of quanitity?
reflects the ability of numerals to provide information about the magnitude of differences between people
what is additivity?
implies that the unit size of a measurement does not change as the units are being counted
