ABSTRACT
Connections With Other Chapters
Chapter 1 has outlined the major historical developments in validity theory. Throughout these developments, the idea of measurement has been prominent. This chapter outlines the most important theories of measurement that in the past have been developed by philosophers and measurement theorists. The chapter relates these theories to the case of measurement in the social sciences and outlines their relevance to the concept of validity.
Measurement plays an important role in our daily lives, and has probably done so since the dawn of humanity. Ancient ruins testify to the presence of measurement procedures long before anything remotely resembling modern science was around. To construct even the simplest building requires one to engage in measurement procedures, however primitive, to assess dimensions such as length and height. Moreover, the ease with which human beings acquire such concepts and learn to evaluate them suggests that measurement procedures are grounded in very basic perceptual and cognitive abilities, rooted in our evolutionary ancestry.