4 Measurement Theory
4.1 Overview
A famous measurement methodologist once said and we paraphrase: “If something exists, we can measure it.” When we want to quantify people’s characteristics pertaining to latent constructs or internal psychological states such as empathy, mindfulness, love, self-efficacy, or stress that we humans make up to help us explain our behavior, one way of doing that is to ask people to tell us something about themselves in regard to what we are trying to measure.
To help us ask people to self-report systematically, we develop scales comprising multiple items. Each item is designed to take a snapshot of a piece of this abstract entity that we want to measure (e.g., empathy) and the items ...
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