Distinguishing categories and dimensions: Taxometric investigations. This project aims to apply and refine promising new methods for classifying psychological variations. These "taxometric" methods detect categories and locate their boundaries, enabling improved taxonomies of personality and mental disorder. They will be used to examine whether personality disorders are discrete categories or fall on a continuum with normal personality, and whether people mentally represent social groups accordi ....Distinguishing categories and dimensions: Taxometric investigations. This project aims to apply and refine promising new methods for classifying psychological variations. These "taxometric" methods detect categories and locate their boundaries, enabling improved taxonomies of personality and mental disorder. They will be used to examine whether personality disorders are discrete categories or fall on a continuum with normal personality, and whether people mentally represent social groups according to qualitatively distinct ontological assumptions. The statistical validity of these methods will be comprehensively assessed. The project should help to resolve enduring questions about psychological classification and deepen our understanding of social stereotyping.Read moreRead less
Multidimensional unfolding: the latitude of acceptance and the structure of the single peaked response process in a multidimensional space. The latitude of acceptance and the operational function that structures the single peaked response process have only recently been understood as central to unidimensional models for the measurement of attitude, preference and choice. They have been neglected in multidimensional models. This project will formalise these two central components in a multidimens ....Multidimensional unfolding: the latitude of acceptance and the structure of the single peaked response process in a multidimensional space. The latitude of acceptance and the operational function that structures the single peaked response process have only recently been understood as central to unidimensional models for the measurement of attitude, preference and choice. They have been neglected in multidimensional models. This project will formalise these two central components in a multidimensional space. The operational function governs the relationship between any item-person distance and the latitude of acceptance defines a multidimensional hyper-sphere within which the more positive response is more likely. The project will articulate and operationalise these models for a range of typical response formats from ranking to pairwise preferences.Read moreRead less