REVIEW article

Front. Psychol.

Sec. Quantitative Psychology and Measurement

Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1553028

This article is part of the Research TopicCritical Debates on Quantitative Psychology and Measurement: Revived and Novel Perspectives on Fundamental ProblemsView all 15 articles

Psychology's questionable research fundamentals (QRFs): Key problems in quantitative psychology and psychological measurement beyond questionable research practices (QRPs)

Provisionally accepted
  • 1University of Greenwich, London, London, United Kingdom
  • 2BI Norwegian Business School, Oslo, Norway
  • 3Advanced Projects R&D Ltd., Auckland, Australia
  • 4Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Munich, Bavaria, Germany
  • 5Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada
  • 6Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Lesser Poland, Poland
  • 7Sigmund Freud Privatuniversität Berlin, Berlin, Baden-Württemberg, Germany
  • 8Mary Immaculate College, Limerick, Ireland
  • 9University of Maryland, Baltimore, Maryland, United States
  • 10Edith Cowan University, Joondalup, Western Australia, Australia
  • 11Tallinn University, Tallinn, Harju County, Estonia
  • 12Monash University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

Psychology’s crises (e.g., replicability, generalisability) are currently believed to derive from Questionable Research Practices (QRPs), thus scientific misconduct. Just improving the same practices, however, cannot tackle the root causes of psychology’s problems—the Questionable Research Fundamentals (QRFs) of many of its theories, concepts, approaches and methods (e.g., psychometrics), which are grounded in their insufficiently elaborated underlying philosophy of science. Key problems of psychological measurement are critically explored from independent perspectives involving various fields of expertise and lines of research that are well established but still hardly known in mainstream psychology. This comprehensive multi-perspectival review presents diverse philosophies of science that are used in quantitative psychology and pinpoints four major areas of development. 1) Psychology must advance its general philosophy of science (esp. ontology, epistemology, methodology) and elaborate coherent paradigms. 2) Quantitative psychologists must elaborate the philosophy-of-science fundamentals of specific theories, approaches and methods that are appropriate for enabling quantitative research and for implementing genuine analogues of measurement in psychology, considering its study phenomena’s peculiarities (e.g., higher-order complexity, non-ergodicity). 3) Psychologists must heed the epistemic necessity to logically distinguish between the study phenomena (e.g., participants’ beliefs) and the means used for their exploration (e.g., descriptions of beliefs in items) to avoid confusing ontological with epistemological concepts—psychologists’ cardinal error. This requires an increased awareness of the complexities of human language (e.g., inbuilt semantics) and of the intricacies that these entail for scientific inquiry. 4) Epistemically justified strategies for generalising findings across unique individuals must be established using case-by-case based (not sample-based) nomothetic approaches, implemented through individual-/person-oriented (not variable-oriented) analyses. This is crucial to avoid the mathematical-statistical errors that are inherent to quantitative psychologists’ common sample-to-individual inferences (e.g., ergodic fallacy) as well as to enable causal analyses of possibly underlying structures and processes. Concluding, just minimising scientific misconduct, as currently believed, and exploiting language-based algorithms (NLP, LLMs) without considering the intricacies of human language will only perpetuate psychology’s crises. Rethinking psychology as a science and advancing its philosophy-of-science theories as necessary fundamentals to integrate its fragmented empirical database and lines of research requires open, honest and self-critical debates that prioritise scientific integrity over expediency.

Keywords: Measurement, Quantitative Psychology, Psychometrics, Language models, ontology, epistemology, methodology, semantics To the copy editors

Received: 29 Dec 2024; Accepted: 01 Jul 2025.

Copyright: © 2025 Uher, Arnulf, Barrett, Heene, Heine, Martin, Mazur, McGann, Mislevy, Speelman, Toomela and Weber. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Jan Ketil Arnulf, BI Norwegian Business School, Oslo, Norway

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.