State-of-the-Art Lecture

Testing for travelers: Past and future

Robert A. Roe
Maastricht University, The Netherlands

Abstract

Unlike testing in other fields of science, psychological testing is essentially comparative. The prevailing technology of testing is based on the paradigm of “individual differences”, which assumes that people are similar except for attributes singled out for comparison. The comparative approach to testing has worked well in homogeneous and stable communities where people spoke the same language, had the same social background and shared the same culture, that is, in well bounded regions with low social and geographic mobility. But in a globalizing world, where people continually travel and communities are poorly bounded, heterogeneous and changing, it seems to be less effective. There are two main problems: (1) the comparisons produced by tests are ambiguous as the scores reflect other sources of variation (e.g. demographics, culture, language, and time); (2) competing instruments for testing travelers  may give different results and it is unclear which test (e.g. which publisher, country, language and date of creation) can best be used. How can these problems be resolved? This keynote argues that psychometrics as we currently know it is unlikely to provide effective solutions. Therefore, it proposes a change in perspective that might lead to another way of testing. Starting from a historical look at how psychological testing has developed in a global environment characterized by diversity and inequality, it highlights the parties involved in testing. It claims that recognition of multiple interacting actors, with their diverging roles, views, and interests, may on the one hand reveal conflict but on the other provide a basis for developing a novel paradigm in which tests get a new purpose and format better suited for the global world of travelers.