Reading and Publications

Reading and Publications

These pages bring together books, working chapters, refereed journal articles, professional publications, reports, interviews and media coverage produced across more than fifty years of research and practice.

They reflect a career that began in neuropsychology and psychophysiology, moved through philosophical psychology and the development of psychological tests, and later extended into computational social science, artificial intelligence and the changing relationship between people and intelligent machines.

Psychometrics in a Changing World

Psychometrics is the science concerned with constructing, evaluating and interpreting measures of psychological characteristics. These may include abilities, personality traits, attitudes, interests, integrity, wellbeing and many other aspects of human behaviour.

Its central questions concern reliability, validity, standardisation, fairness and interpretation. A numerical score becomes useful only when there is defensible evidence about what it measures, how accurately it measures it, and what conclusions may legitimately be drawn from it.

During most of the twentieth century, psychometric assessment was organised around relatively fixed tests. Item response theory and computer adaptive testing changed that model by treating assessment as a measurement system built from calibrated item banks. Digital technology subsequently made it possible to adapt assessments in real time and to derive psychological information from behaviour occurring outside conventional tests.

Generative artificial intelligence introduces another transformation. It can assist with item generation, administration, scoring and interpretation, while also raising new questions about cognitive representativeness, fairness, validity and the relationship between human judgement and automated systems.

The publications collected here therefore serve two purposes. They are an archive of earlier work, but they also provide a working record of questions that remain open as psychometrics enters a new technological era.