The Fallacy of the Theoretical Meaning of Formative Constructs

摘要

The gap between advanced statistical approaches and epistemological discussion is certainly one of the most important problems in psychometrics to really improve psychological measures. An important issue in measurement models in social science is the debate about formative measurement models. For some years, the debate has been essentially focused on methodological issues. We aim in this short article to contribute to a critical discussion of formative models based on ontological discussion (theoretical meaning).