psychological testing

psychological testing, the systematic use of tests to quantify psychophysical behaviour, abilities, and problems and to make predictions about psychological performance.

The word “test” refers to any means (often formally contrived) used to elicit responses to which human behaviour in other contexts can be related. When intended to predict relatively distant future behaviour (e.g., success in school), such a device is called an aptitude test. When used to evaluate the individual’s present academic or vocational skill, it may be called an achievement test. In such settings as guidance offices, mental-health clinics, and psychiatric hospitals, tests of ability and personality may be helpful in the diagnosis and detection of troublesome behaviour. Industry and government alike have been prodigious users of tests for selecting workers. Research workers often rely on tests to translate theoretical concepts (e.g., intelligence) into experimentally useful measures.

General problems of measurement in psychology

Physical things are perceived through their properties or attributes. A mother may directly sense the property called temperature by feeling her infant’s forehead. Yet she cannot directly observe colicky feelings or share the infant’s personal experience of hunger. She must infer such unobservable private sensations from hearing her baby cry or gurgle; from seeing him flail his arms, or frown, or smile. In the same way, much of what is called measurement must be made by inference. Thus, a mother suspecting her child is feverish may use a thermometer, in which case she ascertains his temperature by looking at the thermometer, rather than by directly touching his head.

Indeed, measurement by inference is particularly characteristic of psychology. Such abstract properties or attributes as intelligence or introversion never are directly measured but must be inferred from observable behaviour. The inference may be fairly direct or quite indirect. If persons respond intelligently (e.g., by reasoning correctly) on an ability test, it can be safely inferred that they possess intelligence to some degree. In contrast, people’s capacity to make associations or connections, especially unusual ones, between things or ideas presented in a test can be used as the basis for inferring creativity, although producing a creative product requires other attributes, including motivation, opportunity, and technical skill.

Types of measurement scales

To measure any property or activity is to assign it a unique position along a numerical scale. When numbers are used merely to identify individuals or classes (as on the backs of athletes on a football team), they constitute a nominal scale. When a set of numbers reflects only the relative order of things (e.g., pleasantness-unpleasantness of odours), it constitutes an ordinal scale. An interval scale has equal units and an arbitrarily assigned zero point; one such scale, for example, is the Fahrenheit temperature scale. Ratio scales not only provide equal units but also have absolute zero points; examples include measures of weight and distance.

Britannica Quiz

Fun Facts of Measurement & Math

Although there have been ingenious attempts to establish psychological scales with absolute zero points, psychologists usually are content with approximations to interval scales; ordinal scales often are used as well.