Metric Calibration of Psychological Instruments

Inspired by the history of the metric calibration of instruments in the physical sciences, and by past psychology giants, the current work investigates the metric calibration of psychological instruments and argues that it is both useful and feasible to calibrate the metric of psychological instruments so as to render their metrics non-arbitrary. Concerning utility, a conceptual analysis reveals four categories of proposed benefits of non-arbitrary metrics (e.g., help in the interpretation of data). With respect to feasibility, the metric calibration approach is successfully applied to instruments of seven distinct constructs commonly studied in psychology, across three empirical demonstration studies and re-analyses of other researchers’ data. Metric calibration is achieved by finding empirical linkages between scores of the measures and specifically-configured theoretically-relevant behaviors argued to reflect particular locations on the relevant underlying psychological dimension. Such configured behaviors can then serve as common reference points to calibrate the scores of different instruments, rendering the metric of those instruments non-arbitrary.