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Measurement theory and practice: The world through quantification By D. J. Hand London: Arnold, 2004, Cased £45, ISBN 034067783X
I have been obsessed recently by a rather interesting, if little explored, psychological phenomenon colloquially referred to as the 'elephant in the living room'. Everyone acknowledges its presence in their actions and expressed beliefs, but not the reality of the beast itself. In other words, there are powerful (psychological) determinants of behaviour which are accepted but not explicitly recognised. Measurement in science seems to be something like this in that while everyone assumes that it is both possible and real few bother to argue about its nature or origins. Happily, David Hand's new book reminds us of the importance and centrality of measurement not just in traditional sciences like physics, but more significantly in the psychological and other social sciences. Readers of this journal will be aware of the very long running arguments about the nature of measurement including the relationship between measurement and statistics and the recent twist given the whole issue by Joel Michell who almost seems to be suggesting that since measurement in psychology cannot at present approximate the rigor found in physics nor achieve the necessary independence between theory' and observation, so the scientific status of psychology is highly questionable.
David Hand's answer to this problem is nuanced: there are two aspects or types of measurement, representative and pragmatic, where the former provides an account of how a scale or variable is selected and defined according to its meaning within a (philosophically) realistic theoretical context, while the latter deals with issues like the practical technology of producing as good a fit between the field of application and its measurement as possible, or the personal choice by the analyst of how to define a measurable attribute according...