(This article was originally published at Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science, and syndicated at StatsBlogs.)
Yesterday we posted on Lewis Richardson, a scientist who did pioneering work in weather prediction and, separately, in fractals, in the early twentieth century. I was pointed to Richardson by Lee Sechrest, who I then googled.
His first major book [was] “Psychotherapy and the Psychology of Behavior Change” . . . Sechrest may be best known, however, for another book he co-authored in 1966: “Unobtrusive Measures: A Survey of Nonreactive Research in Social Science” . . .
“‘Unobtrusive Measures’ invoked the notion that we do not have the correct, right, accurate, valid measure of anything,” says Sechrest. “We have measures that are more or less useful under different circumstances. And the best response that we can make to our measurement problem is to use measures that get at the construct of interest in very different way.”
The book has served as an inspiration to many psychologists, encouraging them to go beyond surveys and questionnaires in their attempts to understand behavior . . .
Cool. Measurement is important, and the title and theme of “unobtrusive measurement” seems closely related to ideas we’ve been talking about for awhile regarding the ways in which quantum-mechanical concepts such as Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle might be usefully applied to measurement in the human sciences. I’m still a bit stuck on how this should all be done, but I think the framework makes sense, and it’s interesting to know that a book was written on the topic back in 1966. I guess this is just another demonstration of a longstanding principle of statistics (see also here).
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