I am honored to have been elected as the president of Division 5, one of the charter divisions of APA. As previous presidents have noted, Division 5 has a long and distinguished history within APA, but we have had our ups and downs with regard to membership and finances. Last year we lost one of our two seats on APA Council because we were unable to muster a sufficient number of votes in the annual apportionment process. By the time this article is published, the apportionment process for 2023-24 will have taken place and I sincerely hope to be able to report to you that we have gained back our second seat. It is crucial that Division 5 is able to provide perspective on issues facing the APA membership, and Council seats are an important part way for us to provide this feedback. In particular, Division 5 Council representatives provide key guidance on issues pertinent to quantitative and qualitative methods, assessment, and measurement.
The first Guiding Principle listed in APA’s Strategic Plan is to “build on a foundation of science” and in my opinion members of Division 5 are among the best equipped to help APA further that goal. In response to repeated requests from the various APA Divisions, the APA Science Directorate has promised to issue public calls for scientific expertise on issues facing the Association. These requests will provide opportunities for Division 5 members to deliver feedback on such issues and to demonstrate the value of our division’s expertise. I urge Division 5 members not to be shy about responding to these requests for expertise.
Another pillar of APA’s Strategic Plan is to “champion diversity and inclusion.” One initiative in this arena that I find particularly pertinent to Division 5 members is APA’s Historical Chronology. Although I expect that many of you have already read through this document, I briefly describe it here for those who have not yet had the chance. The document was written in collaboration with the Cummings Center for the History of Psychology at the University of Akron and delineates the contributions of psychology to beliefs in racial hierarchy and to the perpetuation of inequality for people of color in the U.S. Of particular interest to Division 5 members are frequent references to the eugenicist beliefs of many past leaders in testing and assessment. None of this will come as a surprise to Division 5 members, as the unsavory roots of much of psychological testing has been the focus of debate for many years. But the fact that APA has publicly called out these contributions is, in my view, a step in the right direction.
Discussions of the eugenicist origins of psychological testing and of the adverse impacts of test results on members of minoritized groups are not new. As Anne Anastasi and Susana Urbina stated in their discussion of cultural differences in ability testing, “…no single test can be universally applicable or equally ‘fair’ to all cultures. …Every test tends to favor persons from the culture in which it was developed” (Anastasi & Urbina, 1997, 0. 342). These ideas are stated more directly by Jennifer Randall (2021) who, speaking in the context of construct validation, states that “when the domain is left open for interpretation by individual assessment designers, who are disproportionately white…, they will bring their unconscious and implicit biases to those interpretations” (p. 3). Randall points out that the resulting racial differences in educational test scores are often explained by the fact that minoritized students may not have had adequate exposure to the material on the tests – the so-called “opportunity to learn” argument (see the Standards for Educational and Psychological Measurement, 2014, p.56). As Randall notes, this argument neatly sidesteps the more fundamental issue that the test content is likely that valued by the dominant White culture rather than by BIPOC communities, calling into question the need or motivation for BIPOC students to learn it, opportunity or no.
Randall’s statements refer to educational assessments, but the same logic applies to psychological assessments. This is easy to see in the context of ability or intelligence tests, which, as Anastasi and Urbina have pointed out, reflect the (White) culture on which they were based, and it is not too much of a stretch to extend the logic to most psychological tests. For one example of the influence of White culture in testing, we need look no further than the language in which tests are written, Standard American English (SAE). This is the language taught in U.S. schools, drilled into us by high school English teachers, and insisted upon by scorers of writing assessments. But why is this? SAE is not the only version of English spoken in the United States. African American Vernacular English (AAVE) is a language used by a large swath of the U.S. population. AAVE has its own rules and syntax that, linguistically, are as “legitimate” as those of SAE, making it difficult to argue that the SAE linguistic system is in some way “better” than that of AAVE. SAE is used in testing simply because it is the currently accepted language system in the U.S. While this may be obvious, I bring it up as an example of the unconscious control exerted by the dominant White culture in psychological and educational testing.
So what are we, as professionals in the fields of methodology, measurement, and assessment to do? Are correlational and factor analytic methods inherently flawed through their eugenicist origins? Can QuantCrit methods, informed by Critical Race Theory, provide quantitative methodologists with the tools to conduct more critical, nuanced, and racially just research (see Garcia, Lopez, and Velez, 2018, and accompanying volume)? Is it possible to create tests that reflect the entirety of U.S culture, or are tests doomed to be biased toward the majority culture?
These are provocative questions, and deliberately so. But I hope I have piqued your interest to the extent that you will consider attending the 2024 APA Convention August 3 – 5 in Washington, DC, where Division 5’s program focus will be on such issues. I am very pleased to announce that Tufuku Zuberi, PhD, author of the books White Logic, White Methods: Racism and Methodology and Thicker Than Blood: How Racial Statistics Lie, will be the invited speaker for Division 5’s convention program. (Zuberi’s talk has been generously sponsored by the Missouri Prevention Science Institute (moprevention.org)). Plans are also in the works for a panel to discuss ways of incorporating DEI issues into our coursework in quantitative methods and measurement. I hope to see you at the convention!
References
American Educational Research Association, American Psychological Association, National Council on Measurement in Education (2014). Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing. Washington, DC: AERA.
Anastasi, A., & Urbina, S. (1997). Psychological Testing (7th ed.), Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Garcia, N. M., López, N., & Vélez, V. N. (2018) QuantCrit: Rectifying quantitative methods through critical race theory, Race Ethnicity and Education, 21(2), 149-157, DOI: 10.1080/13613324.2017.1377675
Randall, J. (2021). “Color-Neutral” is not a thing: Construct definition and representation through a justice-oriented critical antiracist lens. Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice, 40(4), 82-90. doi.org/10.1111/emip.12429