My research

My research interest lies at the intersection of psychological methods, statistics and philosophy. In particular my research focuses on the theory underlying psychological measurement and its relation to the statistical models that are used as measurement models in psychology. Some examples of questions that I have worked on: What are the implications of interpreting psychometric models as causal models or as summaries of the data? Are equivalent models the same model? How can we interpret measurement error?

IAS Fellowship

The question I work on during my fellowship at IAS is 'How do network theories of psychological properties change the way we should measure these properties?'. I am interested in this question both from a psychometric perspective and a philosophy of science perspective. In psychology we have seen a shift in which psychological constructs that were conceptualized as latent common causes of behavior are now conceptualized as networks or dynamical systems.

From the psychometric perspective, I would like to build a measurement model that is consistent with viewing psychological properties as properties in networks or dynamical systems. From a philosophy of science perspective, the change from a latent variable perspective to a network perspective is an interesting case to look at epistemic iteration, which is a notion introduced by Hasok Chang to describe a process in which theory about a concept and measurement practices for that concept iteratively revise each other over time.