(1887–1955; b. Chicago, IL; d. Chapel Hill, TN) American psychometrician. Thurstone graduated from Cornell U with a BS in electrical engineering in 1912. This led to employment with Thomas Edison. Thurstone was interested in the way people learn, and this led to a PhD in psychology from U Chicago in 1917. He then joined the faculty at Carnegie Institute of Technology, moving in 1924 to a chair at U Chicago. In 1931 he introduced the method of factor analysis. He was President of the American Psychological Association in 1933 and, in 1935, the first President of the Psychometric Society.
Louis Leon Thurstone
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| Biography: Louis Leon Thurstone |
The American psychologist Louis Leon Thurstone (1887-1955) was universally heralded as the most renowned psychometrician of his time. He led the way in mental measurement and testing through quantitative methods.
Louis Leon Thurstone, whose original family name was Thünström, was born on May 29, 1887, in Chicago. He attended school in various places in the United States as well as in Stockholm. In high school, at Jamestown, N.Y., he experimented with musical composition; mastered three typewriter keyboards; wrote a letter, published by Scientific American, on a problem of diversion of water from Niagara Falls; invented a method of trisecting an angle; and developed a talent for sketching into a lifelong hobby of photography. At Cornell University, from which he received an engineering degree, Thurstone designed a patented motion picture projector that was later demonstrated in the laboratory of Thomas Edison, with whom Thurstone worked briefly as an assistant.
Thurstone's first teaching experience, in the College of Engineering at the University of Minnesota, stimulated his interest in the learning process and human abilities. Hence he pursued a doctorate in psychology (1917) at the University of Chicago, to which he returned in 1924 to found his first psychometric laboratory after a brief but productive period at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. Upon his retirement from the University of Chicago in 1952, he continued his work at the University of North Carolina, where what is now the L. L. Thurstone Psychometric Laboratory was established.
Thurstone's major books and monographs are The Nature of Intelligence (1924), The Fundamentals of Statistics (1925), The Measurement of Attitude (1929, coauthored with E. J. Chave), The Reliability and Validity of Tests (1931), The Vectors of Mind (1935), Primary Mental Abilities (1938), Factorial Studies of Intelligence (1941, coauthored with his wife, Thelma Gwinn Thurstone), A Factorial Study of Perception (1944), and Multiple-factor Analysis (1947). A collection of important papers, all provocative contributions, is contained in The Measurement of Values (1959). In 1936 he and his followers founded the Psychometric Society and a journal, Psyckometrika, to promote the development of psychology as a quantitative rational science.
The most notable work by Thurstone was in the areas of test theory, psychological scaling, attitude measurement, and multiple-factor analysis - a set of techniques now applicable well beyond the realm of psychology. Yet he tackled many problems in psychological measurement and seems never to have failed to bring them nearer to solution. His great attraction for students and their creative work, even to the second and third generations, are already legendary. On Sept. 29, 1955, Thurstone, died in Chapel Hill, N. C.
Further Reading
Biographies of Thurstone are J. P. Guilford, Louis Leon Thurstone, 1887-1955 (1957), and Dorothy A. Wood, Louis Leon Thurstone (1962).
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(1887–1955). American pioneer in psychometrics (mental measurement). Thurstone was born in Chicago of Swedish ancestry, obtained his doctorate at the University of Chicago, and taught there until he retired to Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Earlier he had studied as an electrical engineer, and worked with Edison on cine projection; but in 1914 he turned to psychology, and became involved in the production of tests for army recruits in the First World War.
The earliest attempts at mental measurement were the so-called psychophysical methods, developed by German psychologists in the 19th century for studying people's sensitivity to touch, sound, and other sensations. For example, what was the smallest difference in pitch between two tones that people could detect? Thurstone showed that such methods could be extended to much more complex qualities, such as the strength of attitudes, e.g. like or dislike of communism, capital punishment, black people, or the Church. He published a number of such attitude scales, and used them for measuring the effects of propaganda on people's prejudices. Many subsequent research workers in social psychology have constructed, and made use of, Thurstone-type scales.
Another topic was the measurement of progress in learning (i.e. the plotting of learning 'curves'), and in mental development generally. He showed how to express such development in absolute units, comparable to physical measurements. This made it possible to predict the zero point of mental growth, namely around three months before birth.
Thurstone was prolific in the construction of intelligence tests and, being dissatisfied with current definitions of intelligence, he published a thoughtful book, The Nature of Intelligence (1924). This he approached from the biological angle, rather than the logical or statistical. In the 1930s he contested Charles Spearman's view of intelligence as a unitary, general or 'g' factor. He proposed that it is a combination of several distinctive abilities, e.g. verbal comprehension, reasoning, memory. And he superseded Spearman's statistical technique of measuring g with a much more flexible procedure known as multiple factor analysis, which could handle numerous ability factors simultaneously. With his primary mental abilities tests, constructed for various age groups, he could obtain a profile of each person's strengths and weaknesses (see Vectors of the Mind, 1935, and Multiple Factor Analysis, 1947). It is for this work on factor analysis that he is most widely known, and it was applied by him, or his numerous followers, to many practical problems: for example, isolating the main distinguishable types of mental illness, analysing human perceptual abilities, or developing new tests of such special aptitudes as mechanical ability.
Thurstone was interested too in the measurement of personality characteristics, and published a widely used test of psychoneurotic tendencies. In each of the many areas that he touched he produced original ideas, and innovative techniques of measurement. He also advanced the study of his subject by founding the outstanding journal Psychometrika, and guiding it for nearly twenty years, until his death.
(Published 1987)
The earliest attempts at mental measurement were the so-called psychophysical methods, developed by German psychologists in the 19th century for studying people's sensitivity to touch, sound, and other sensations. For example, what was the smallest difference in pitch between two tones that people could detect? Thurstone showed that such methods could be extended to much more complex qualities, such as the strength of attitudes, e.g. like or dislike of communism, capital punishment, black people, or the Church. He published a number of such attitude scales, and used them for measuring the effects of propaganda on people's prejudices. Many subsequent research workers in social psychology have constructed, and made use of, Thurstone-type scales.
Another topic was the measurement of progress in learning (i.e. the plotting of learning 'curves'), and in mental development generally. He showed how to express such development in absolute units, comparable to physical measurements. This made it possible to predict the zero point of mental growth, namely around three months before birth.
Thurstone was prolific in the construction of intelligence tests and, being dissatisfied with current definitions of intelligence, he published a thoughtful book, The Nature of Intelligence (1924). This he approached from the biological angle, rather than the logical or statistical. In the 1930s he contested Charles Spearman's view of intelligence as a unitary, general or 'g' factor. He proposed that it is a combination of several distinctive abilities, e.g. verbal comprehension, reasoning, memory. And he superseded Spearman's statistical technique of measuring g with a much more flexible procedure known as multiple factor analysis, which could handle numerous ability factors simultaneously. With his primary mental abilities tests, constructed for various age groups, he could obtain a profile of each person's strengths and weaknesses (see Vectors of the Mind, 1935, and Multiple Factor Analysis, 1947). It is for this work on factor analysis that he is most widely known, and it was applied by him, or his numerous followers, to many practical problems: for example, isolating the main distinguishable types of mental illness, analysing human perceptual abilities, or developing new tests of such special aptitudes as mechanical ability.
Thurstone was interested too in the measurement of personality characteristics, and published a widely used test of psychoneurotic tendencies. In each of the many areas that he touched he produced original ideas, and innovative techniques of measurement. He also advanced the study of his subject by founding the outstanding journal Psychometrika, and guiding it for nearly twenty years, until his death.
(Published 1987)
— Philip E. Vernon
| Wikipedia: Louis Leon Thurstone |
| Louis Leon Thurstone | |
|---|---|
| Born | May 29, 1887 Chicago, Illinios |
| Died | September 30, 1955 (aged 68) |
| Nationality |  American |
| Fields | Psychometrics |
| Institutions | University of Chicago University of North Carolina |
| Alma mater | Cornell University and University of Chicago |
| Doctoral advisor | James Angell |
| Doctoral students | Paul Horst Calvin Taylor Ledyard R Tucker Thelma Thurstone Harold Gulliksen |
| Known for | Multiple Factor Analysis Intelligence testing Law of Comparative Judgment |
 |
This article's citation style may be unclear. The references used may be made clearer with a different or consistent style of citation, footnoting, or external linking. |
Louis Leon Thurstone (May 29, 1887 – September 30, 1955) was a U.S. pioneer in the fields of psychometrics and psychophysics. He conceived the approach to measurement known as the law of comparative judgment, and is well known for his contributions to factor analysis.
Contents |
Background and history
Thurstone originally received a masters in Mechanical Engineering from Cornell University in 1912, before undertaking a PhD in Psychology at the University of Chicago, which he completed in 1917. He later returned to that university, and he taught and conducted research there between 1924 and 1952. He is responsible for the standardized mean and standard deviation of IQ scores used today, as opposed to the Intelligence Test system originally used by Alfred Binet. He is also known for the development of the Thurstone scale.[1]
Thurstone was also an environmentalist, and suggested an early system for generating hydroelectric power from rivers and waterfalls.
Factor analysis and work on intelligence
Thurstone's work in factor analysis led him to formulate a model of intelligence center around "Primary Mental Abilities" (PMAs), which were independent group factors of intelligence that different individuals possessed in varying degrees. He opposed the notion of a singular general intelligence that factored into the scores of all psychometric tests and was expressed as a mental age. In 1935 Thurstone, together with EL Thorndike and JP Guilford founded the journal Psychometrika and also the Psychometric Society, going on to become the society's first President in 1936. Thurstone's contributions to methods of factor analysis have proved invaluable in establishing and verifying later psychometric factor structures, and has influenced the hierarchical models of intelligence in use in intelligence tests such as WAIS and the modern Stanford-Binet IQ test.
The seven primary mental abilities in Thurstone's model were verbal comprehension, word fluency, number facility, spatial visualization, associative memory, perceptual speed and reasoning.
Contributions to measurement
Despite his contributions to factor analysis, Thurstone (1959, p. 267) cautioned: "When a problem is so involved that no rational formulation is available, then some quantification is still possible by the coefficients of correlation of contingency and the like. But such statistical procedures constitute an acknowledgement of failure to rationalize the problem and to establish functions that underlie the data. We want to measure the separation between the two opinions on the attitude continuum and we want to test the validity of the assumed continuum by means of its internal consistency". Thurstone's approach to measurement was termed the law of comparative judgment. He applied the approach in psychophysics, and later to the measurement of psychological values. The so-called 'Law', which can be regarded as a measurement model, involves subjects making a comparison between each of a number of pairs of stimuli with respect to magnitude of a property, attribute, or attitude. Methods based on the approach to measurement can be used to estimate such scale values.
Thurstone's Law of comparative judgment has important links to modern approaches to social and psychological measurement. In particular, the approach bears a close conceptual relation to the Rasch model (Andrich, 1978), although Thurstone typically employed the normal distribution in applications of the Law of comparative judgment whereas the Rasch model is a simple logistic function. Thurstone anticipated a key epistemological requirement of measurement later articulated by Rasch, which is that relative scale locations must 'transcend' the group measured; i.e. scale locations must be invariant to (or independent of) the particular group of persons instrumental to comparisons between the stimuli. Thurstone (1929) also articulated what he referred to as the additivity criterion for scale differences, a criterion which must be satisfied in order to obtain interval-level measurements.
Footnotes
References
 |
This article includes a list of references or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it has insufficient inline citations. Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations where appropriate. (February 2008) |
- Martin, O (1997). "[Psychological measurement from Binet to Thurstone, (1900-1930)]" (in French). Revue de synthese (4): 457–93. PMID 11625304.
- Thurstone, LL (1987). "Psychophysical analysis. By L. L. Thurstone, 1927". The American journal of psychology 100 (3-4): 587–609. PMID 3322058.
- Gulliksen, H (1968). "Louis Leon Thurstone, experimental and mathematical psychologist". The American psychologist 23 (11): 786–802. doi:. PMID 4881041.
- Wolfle, D (1956). "Louis Leon Thurstone, 1887-1955.". The American journal of psychology 69 (1): 131–4. PMID 13302517.
- Horst, P (1955). "L.L. Thurstone and the science of human behavior.". Science 122 (3183): 1259–60. doi:. PMID 13274085.
- Andrich, D. (1978). "Relationships Between the Thurstone and Rasch Approaches to Item Scaling". Applied Psychological Measurement 2: 451. doi:.
- Thurstone, L. L. (1927). "A law of comparative judgement". Psychological Review 34: 278–286. doi:.
- Gordon, Kate; Smith, Thomas Vernor, eds (1929). Essays in Philosophy: by Seventeen Doctors of Philosophy of the University of Chicago. Chicago: Open Court. OCLC 257229209.
- Thurstone, L. L. (1974) [1959]. The Measurement of Values. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-80114-8. OCLC 5723850.
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