Why Do Judgments on Different Person-Descriptive Attributes Correlate With One Another? A Conceptual Analysis With Relevance for Most Psychometric Research
Patterns of correlations among judgments of targets on different attributes are the basis for common psychometric procedures such as factor analysis and network modeling. The outcomes of such analyses may shape the images (i.e., theories) that we as scientists have of the phenomena that we study. However, key conceptual issues tend to be overlooked in these analyses, which is especially problemati
