This “Modeling Measures” symposium will follow and expand upon the “New Metrological Horizons” special session immediately preceding it. As established in the prior session, over the course of several decades, measurement researchers in the human sciences (psychology and the social sciences) developed what have recently been recognized by metrologists as belonging to the same class of concepts, theories, models, and results “that metrologists consider paradigmatic of measurement” (Mari & Wilson, 2014, p. 326). The previous lack of input from metrologists in human sciences measurement has changed in the last 15 years or so as collaborations of psychometricians and metrologists have begun negotiating the terms of a shared perspective applicable across the sciences. These collaborations, in turn, have also begun to feed back into how measurement is framed and communicated within the human sciences, contributing to more confident and articulated introductions to and applications of measurement.

This session focuses on instrument design as the basic narrative structure of the story to be told by a measurement system. Contributions to the special session will expand on the intention to measure and the specification of metrologically viable measurement models in theory-informed explanatory approaches to quantification. These approaches address (a) covariate factors causing and contributing to differences in person abilities, skills, knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors; (b) facets of assessment and survey item design; and (c) combinations of item and person explanatory models, including subgroup by item effects, and structural effects of mixtures. The IMEKO scientific community will find the session of value for its introductory exposition of approaches to the modeling of not-yet quantified measurands and how these may be carried through to the conceptualization and estimation of public values for metrologically quality assured units of measurement.