ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an introduction to psychometrics and to this book. A brief history of psychometrics is offered to set the stage. The measurement process is then outlined in the context of educational, psychological, health-related, and other types of assessment, and specific psychometric issues in each of these fields are discussed. We then introduce the datasets used in this book, and we provide introduction to R. The chapter then focuses on exploration of measurement data with descriptive statistics and on modelling measurement data with probabilistic models. Final section introduces the interactive ShinyItemAnalysis application which is used throughout the book.
