Psychometrics

The science of psychological measurement — how assessments of things you can't observe directly are built and how their quality is evaluated.

Psychometrics is the branch of psychology concerned with the theory and technique of measurement: how to design assessments of things that can't be observed directly — like burnout, depression, or personality — and how to judge whether those assessments actually work.

In practice, psychometrics is what separates a validated instrument from an unvalidated online "quiz." It provides the tools for evaluating an assessment's validity (does it measure the right thing?) and reliability (does it measure consistently?), through methods ranging from classical test theory to item response theory. Most of the other terms in this glossary — validity, reliability, factor analysis, cutoff scores — are psychometric concepts.

Validity — The extent to which a psychological assessment measures what it claims to measure.
Reliability — The consistency of an assessment's results across repeated administrations and across items.
Item response theory (IRT) — A modern measurement framework that models how a person's trait level relates to their probability of each item response.
Factor analysis — A family of statistical methods for identifying the underlying latent factors that explain correlations among observed items.
Construct validity — Evidence that an assessment actually measures the abstract concept (construct) it claims to measure.

Psychometrics

Related terms