Mind the (Construct-Measurement) Gap

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This article refers to:

Questioning Psychological Constructs: Current Issues and Proposed Changes

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Others consider dartboard analogies “traditional”, dated, and insufficient for discussing measurement today (e.g. Peeters & Harpe, 2020).

2 Currently there are debates about the scope and inclusivity/exclusivity of constructs. There is no inherent contradiction between the views espoused here and those in Hodson (2021b), where some researchers were confronted for not being open to more expansive ideas about constructs such as microaggressions. The central message is the same: Researchers should try their best to specify constructs clearly, whether they be limited and localized or expansive, hierarchical, and general. The empirical testing of these constructs using the best available evidence remains the central task of psychological scientists. In other words, constructs should be as specific versus broad as they need to be to capture the phenomenon at hand, with the goal of reducing the gap between theorized constructs and gathered evidence.

3 In the discipline of Psychology we have a tendency to treat theoretical models as sacrosanct and deeply “personal”, deeply linked to the developer of the construct. As such, attempts to test and refine theories or constructs are often taken as personal attacks instead of good-faith attempts to better understand and refine the fit between theory and data (see Hodson, 2021a).