ABSTRACT
The style domain has been widely recognized as frustrated by a plethora of disparate conceptualizations and theoretical perspectives well summarized in the literature, most recently by Peterson, Rayner, and Armstrong (2009). This chapter aims to help scholars in the style domain understand psychometrics and how these can contribute to furthering consensus in future research by outlining some of the basic ways in which it can help by defining, refining, and validating a disparate domain. While appreciated in the operationalization of theories, psychometrics has much more to offer to the validation of individual theories as well as the validation of the domain as a whole. We explain how some of the statistical routines used by psychometricians are far more ‘rubbery’ as flexible tools than is often realized and why statistics working together with substantive theory is so important in practical research.
