Embretson Susan E
School of Psychology, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332-0170, USA.
Am Psychol. 2006 Jan;61(1):50-5; discussion 62-71. doi: 10.1037/0003-066X.61.1.50.
H. Blanton and J. Jaccard examined the arbitrariness of metrics in the context of 2 current issues: (a) the measurement of racial prejudice and (b) the establishment of clinically significant change. According to Blanton and Jaccard, although research findings are not undermined by arbitrary metrics, individual scores and score changes may not be meaningfully interpreted. The author believes that their points are mostly valid and that their examples were appropriate. However, Blanton and Jaccard's article does not lead directly to solutions, nor did it adequately describe the scope of the metric problem. This article has 2 major goals. First, some prerequisites for nonarbitrary metrics are presented and related to Blanton and Jaccard's issues. Second, the impact of arbitrary metrics on psychological research findings are described. In contrast to Blanton and Jaccard (2006), research findings suggest that metrics have direct impact on statistics for group comparisons and trend analysis.
H. 布兰顿和J. 雅卡德在当前两个问题的背景下研究了指标的随意性：（a）种族偏见的测量；（b）具有临床意义的变化的确定。根据布兰顿和雅卡德的观点，尽管研究结果不会因随意的指标而受到削弱，但个体得分及得分变化可能无法得到有意义的解释。作者认为他们的观点大多是正确的，且他们所举的例子也恰当。然而，布兰顿和雅卡德的文章并未直接给出解决方案，也没有充分描述指标问题的范围。本文有两个主要目标。其一，提出非随意指标的一些先决条件，并将其与布兰顿和雅卡德所讨论的问题联系起来。其二，描述随意指标对心理学研究结果的影响。与布兰顿和雅卡德（2006年）的观点不同，研究结果表明指标对组间比较统计和趋势分析有直接影响。
