Expertise

Item Response Theory and Factor Analysis

Issues encountered in psychological measurement and in the analysis of psychological data

Short Bio 

Ph.D. psychology from KU Leuven Belgium
Previous positions at the KU Leuven and University of Amsterdam
Ohio State University since 2012

Research

My research focuses on explanatory measurement and what psychometric models can reveal about human behavior beyond the measurement of constructs: the effect of item and person covariates, underlying mechanisms and dynamics in the domain of cognitive abilities, emotion, and clinical syndromes. Model violations such as remaining dependencies and violations of measurement invariance are not just modeling issues. They also are an important source of psychological information. Psychometric modeling is not just a method to rely on for measurement, it also is an approach to understand human behavior.

I am also interested in the basis of the replication crisis in psychology and how to counter the crisis. The problems can be methodological and can be caused by the highly competitive nature of research. They are most likely also related to inherent features of the human behavior that is investigated. They are of a kind that uncertainty of inferences are underestimated. See De Boeck & Jeon (2018) in Psychological Bulletin for a review, and for a way to estimate an extra source of uncertainty in regression analysis, see Agler & De Boeck (2020) in Behavioral Research Methods.

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