An Introduction to Psychometrics and Psychological Assessment

Preceded by: Psychological testing : theory and practice, 2019

An Introduction to Psychometrics and Psychological Assessment is the successor to Cooper’s prize-winning book Psychological Testing: Theory and Practice. This expanded and updated volume shows how psychological questionnaires and tests can be chosen, administered, scored, interpreted and developed. In providing students, researchers, test users, test developers and practitioners in the social sciences, education and health with an evaluative guide to choosing, using, interpreting and developing tests, it provides readers a thorough grasp of the principles (and limitations) of testing, together with the necessary methodological detail.

This book has three distinctive features. First, it stresses the basic logic of psychological assessment without getting bogged down with mathematics; the spreadsheet simulations and utilities which are integrated into the text allow users to explore how numbers behave, rather than reading equations. Readers will "learn by doing". Second, it covers both the theory behind psychological assessment and the practicalities of locating, designing and using tests and interpreting their scores. Finally, it is evaluative. Rather than just describing concepts such as test reliability or adaptive testing, it stresses the underlying principles, merits and drawbacks of each approach to assessment, and methods of developing and evaluating questionnaires and tests. Unusually for an introductory text, it includes coverage of several cutting-edge techniques, and this new edition expands the discussion on measurement invariance, methods of detecting/quantifying bias and hierarchical factor models, and features added sections on:

• Best practices for translation of tests into other languages and problems of cultural bias