FREE BOOK: Psychometrics in exercises using R and RStudio

Brown, Anna. (2024). Psychometrics in exercises using R and RStudio. Textbook and data resource. Available to read online on https://bookdown.org/annabrown/psychometricsR

To download data for exercises in this book, go HERE

Why I wrote this book?

This book was born from computing workshop exercises that I created for my students over the past 13 years to practice psychometric techniques that they learnt in lectures. When preparing exercises for them, it quickly became apparent that while there are many good textbooks about psychometric theory (my absolute favourite is “Test Theory: A Unified Treatment” by the late Roderick McDonald), there aren’t any comprehensive sources of practical exercises that students can use to internalise and practice these techniques. Various tutorials have good illustrations with data, but they do not provide a systematic guide that an instructor can use to teach students, and they do not provide self-test questions that students can answer to test own understanding.

This book is intended to fill this gap.

What is this book for?

This book can be used for teaching by university lecturers and instructors. They may use data examples and analyses provided in this book as illustrations in their lessons (acknowledging the source), or simply adopt the book for the practical/computing part of their course.

This book can be used for self-study by anybody who want to acquire practical skills in conducting psychometric analyses. These may be students and researchers in the fields of psychology, or any behavioural or social science, of any age and level – undergraduate and postgraduate, PhD and postdoctoral researchers, and seasoned researchers who want to acquire new skills in psychometrics. These may also be practitioners in various fields of assessment who need to be able to make sense of their data or create new assessments.

This book can also be used for self-study by people with some experience in Psychometrics, but wanting to learn how to do these analyses in R, perhaps moving from another software program like SPSS.

How this book is organised

The book is organised into 24 exercises, each showcasing unique psychometric techniques. Although exercises are self-contained, some will refer to related techniques described in previous exercises, so it is recommended to approach the exercises in order, particularly if you are new to Psychometrics. The exercises are grouped into 10 parts:

• Part One. Introduction to psychometric scaling methods
• Part Two. Classical Test Theory and Reliability Theory
• Part Three. Test homogeneity and Single-Factor Model
• Part Four. Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)
• Part Five. Item Response Theory (IRT) analysis
• Part Six. Differential Item Functioning (DIF) analysis
• Part Seven. Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)
• Part Eight. Path analysis
• Part Nine. Structural equation modelling
• Part Ten. Multiple-group structural equation modelling