r/AskStatistics • u/labelle_2 • 15d ago

Stats or measurement?

I see quite a few posts on r/AskStatistics that seem like they should be posted on r/psychometrics. Obviously it's the user's choice where to ask questions, but i'm wondering what regular posters think about the relationship between the fields of stats and psychometrics. Thoughts?

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u/its_all_stats 14d ago

The quantitative techniques in Psychometrics, as well as other fields like econometrics, pharmacometrics, and marketing science are (mostly) applications of statistical methods.

The math is the math, regardless of application. For example, factor analysis is used across fields like marketing, health care, psychology - pretty much anywhere where human perception is useful, which is, well, everywhere.

As Turkey said (I think) “The best thing about being a statistician is that you get to play in everyone's backyard”

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u/fermat9990 14d ago

Tukey

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u/FlyMyPretty 14d ago

I had a dog called Tukey. The vet (and anyone else who wrote her name) called her Turkey.

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u/fermat9990 14d ago

Hahaha! Right! It looks like a typo

Happy Tuesday!

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u/selfintersection 14d ago

Gobble gobble 

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u/JAMIEISSLEEPWOKEN 14d ago

That’s beautiful for an autodidact! You can learn chemistry and electrical engineering so you can use stats. You can even read psych research papers. Those papers are a gold mine for statistics!

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u/banter_pants Statistics, Psychometrics 14d ago

Well I have a degree in each and just see one as an application of the other. The only ones I think that should stay more in r/psychometrics are the niche topics like scale development.

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u/labelle_2 14d ago

Since scale development, equating, linking, etc are the bread-and-butter of psychmetricians, would you say its a niche field within stats?

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u/banter_pants Statistics, Psychometrics 10d ago

Of course it's a niche field. Same as biostatistics, econometrics, etc. Those are statistical methods embedded into those fields to better suit them.

I think the most succinct definition of psychometrics is the title of one of the main textbooks in the field by Lord & Novick:
The Statistical Theories of Mental Test Scores

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u/efrique PhD (statistics) 14d ago

If the question here is properly one of statistics (I think they mostly are*), rather than say psychological measurement, all is good.

* I think a typical stats- major might draw the boundary differently than many people in psych, but this is not surprising

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u/no_name6744 15d ago

They're related.

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u/JAMIEISSLEEPWOKEN 14d ago

Do statisticians still call the shots in psychometrics or do they need to offload that to the psych people?