The European Journal of Personality is seeking paper proposals for the 2024 Special Issue on “Measurement Processes and Interpretation” and invites you to submit a proposal for a theoretical, methodological, and/or empirical paper that addresses this topic.
Valid and reliable measurement is essential to the behavioural sciences, critical to replicability, generalizability, and interpretation of empirical evidence. Despite this, historically there have been persistently unresolved questions about how to best develop and interpret psychological measures. Many of these questions have found renewed saliency with the development of new technologies for measuring behavioural and neurobiological variables, concerns about the replicability of scientific findings, and empirical and theoretical developments regarding causality, prediction, and levels of analysis. Some of the issues involved include how to interpret the units and scale of values obtained from psychological measures, the meaning of measurements vis-a-vis causal processes underlying corresponding measures, the generalizability of measurements across different persons and timepoints, possible limits to psychological and neurobehavioral measurement, and how to integrate observations obtained from disparate sources in a coherent measurement process.
Scope of Topics for the Special Issue The aim of this Special Issue is to improve interpretation of psychological measurements, in terms of measurement process and the meaning of measurement values, especially with regard to individual differences. We are looking for theoretical, methodological, and/or empirical papers that inform our understanding of measurement process and interpretation.
Psychometric theory and modeling papers are welcome, although they should provide novel perspectives on or insights into measurement process and interpretation, beyond extensions of conventional frameworks to specific scenarios. Similarly, papers reporting on the development or properties of conventional tests, assessments, or protocols are outside the scope of the special section, although manuscripts using results from novel measurement projects as illustrative examples are welcome. Papers focused on traditional variance decomposition of self-report measures, such as with cross-sectional factor analysis or network analysis, are likewise inappropriate for this special section. Papers from a broad range of the psychological and neurobehavioral sciences are welcome, although they should remain in the journal's scope. We are particularly interested in papers that go beyond critiques to offer solutions to measurement challenges.
Along these lines, some examples of welcomed manuscript topics or characteristics are:
The meaning of units or values of measurement, or limits thereof.
The precise referents or measurands of personality measurement processes.
Methods for, and theories of, how to integrate data from very different levels of analysis, sources, or timescale in measurement.
Experimental or other causally informative designs that elucidate mechanisms of personality measurement process.
Novel perspectives on measurement properties such as error or invariance.
Designs that leverage causal theories of measurement process to address challenges in measurement development and modeling.
Reconciling measurement with other epistemiological and inferential goals such as prediction.
What is the timeline?
31st August 2022: Deadline for proposals
31st September 2022: Feedback on the proposals and invitations for full papers
31st April 2023: First submissions of full papers
April 2023 - February 2024: Review and revision process
April 2024: Publication of special issue
How to propose a paper for the EJP 2024 Special Issue?
Please send a brief proposal (approximately 2 pages) of your planned contribution including a summary of research questions, participants and sampling details, designs/methods/analyses, and variables no later than August 31st, 2022 to Kristian Markon kristian-markon@uiowa.edu.
We also strongly encourage the guidelines of open science and thus, ask to make explicit statements on how the authors plan on implementing these. In preparing your proposal, please review carefully the guidelines of the European Journal of Personality. Pay special attention to our Evaluation Criteria and Open Science Policy.
Please contact us in case you have any further questions.
Best regards,
Kristian E. Markon (Associate Editor)