Psychometrics is a well-developed field in psychology, and usability researchers began to use psychometric methods to develop and evaluate questionnaires to assess usability a little over ten years ago (Sweeney & Dillon, 1987). The goal of psychometrics is to establish the quality of psychological measures (Nunnally, 1978). Is a measure reliable (consistent)? Given a reliable measure, is it val...

Advances in computational psychometrics and mathematical methods have been gaining a significant role in both medicine and psychology over these past years. The mainstream in psychometrics is moving towards ever greater use of computational and mathematical modeling techniques. Such techniques are critical in the emerging fields of affective and wearable computing, where new biomedical instrume...

Psychometrics has always been confronted with fundamental criticism, highlighting serious insufficiencies and fallacies. Many fallacies persist, however, because each critic explores only some while still building on others. This article scrutinizes the epistemological, metatheoretical, methodological foundations of psychometrics, revealing a complex network numerous conceptual underlying its f...