Important Measurement Checks in Psychological Research Ignored

What is it about?

An important aspect of psychology is using questionnaires or tests to measure how people behave or feel. These tools are often used to compare different groups. For example, researchers may want to know if stress levels differ between younger and older people, or how students' academic performance changes from childhood to adolescence. To make sure these comparisons are fair, the questionnaires need to measure the same for all groups— this is known as 'measurement invariance'. Without measurement invariance, the results of these comparisons may not be valid. This study analyzed 426 articles from psychological research to find out how often groups of people were compared using questionnaires or tests. A key question was whether these comparisons included a test for measurement invariance. If they did not, an attempt was made to check for measurement invariance using the data that were shared with the articles. The findings were worrying. Only 4% of all comparisons included a measurement invariance test, and the reported results could not be replicated. Moreover, newly performed tests showed that almost 60% of comparisons were not measurement invariant.

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Photo by Piret Ilver on Unsplash

Photo by Piret Ilver on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Not ensuring fair questionnaires can have important implications. For example, if a company uses a questionnaire to understand employee satisfaction, but the questionnaire is not measurement invariant, the results might wrongly show that one department is more satisfied than it truly is. This could lead to misinformed decisions and unfair policies. In psychology, such inaccuracies might result in drawing wrong conclusions about behavioral patterns. If a study claims that older people are less stressed than younger people, but the questionnaire is biased towards older people, this conclusion could be misleading. These inaccuracies affect how we understand and tackle important societal issues like mental health, education, and workplace well-being. The study's message is clear: researchers need to be more careful in ensuring their tools validly measure across different groups of people. This will make results more trustworthy and help researchers and policymakers in making more informed decisions, whether in healthcare, education, or the workplace. The results are a call for more rigorous checks in psychological measurement, to ensure that the experiences and behaviors of everyone are measured and understood fairly and accurately.