ABSTRACT
This chapter turns out that latent structure matters in a multitude of ways for the tasks facing both scientist and practitioner, and that taxometric research can serve many purposes, both basic and applied. It discusses the important intellectual versus practical implications of latent structure, it should be noted that many of the relevant issues overlap and interrelate across the personality and ability domains. Clinical psychologists operate within the context of psychiatric classification systems, and clinical researchers and theorists often argue that the boundaries drawn by these systems between mental disorders, or between particular disorders and normal functioning, are incorrectly located or arbitrarily imposed on latent dimensions of pathology. Tailoring an assessment instrument to the latent structure of the construct being assessed can influence not only the reliability and validity of the resulting scores, but also the length of the instrument. The distinction between taxonic and dimensional constructs has research implications that go well beyond issues of statistical analysis.
