Dr Anna Brown

Dr Anna Brown is a psychometrician with an established reputation and extensive industry experience. Currently she is teaching psychological methods and conducting research in psychometrics at the School of Psychology. Previously, Anna taught short courses in applied psychometrics at the University of Cambridge, where she also conducted research focusing on modelling response biases in questionnaire data. Anna's industry experiences included research and test development at the research division of the UK largest occupational test publisher, SHL Group, where she had worked as Principal Research Statistician for many years. 

Anna holds an MSc degree in Mathematics with distinction and a PhD in Psychology with distinction. Anna's PhD research led to the development of the Thurstonian IRT model described as a breakthrough in scoring of forced-choice questionnaires, and received the 'Best Dissertation' award from the Psychometric Society. Applications of this methodology include the development of an IRT-scored version of Occupational Personality Questionnaire (OPQ32r).  

Anna’s research focuses on psychological measurement and psychometric testing, particularly issues in test validity and test fairness. She uses latent variable models including Multidimensional Item Response Theory (MIRT) to model responses to typical performance tests including ipsative questionnaires, and to model response biases in self-report measures and in feedback reports to individuals and organisations.

Key publications

• Brown, A. & Maydeu-Olivares, A. (2018). Ordinal Factor Analysis of Graded-Preference Questionnaire Data. Structural Equation Modeling: A Multidisciplinary Journal, 25(4), 516-529. DOI: 10.1080/10705511.2017.1392247
• Brown, A. (2016). Item Response Models for Forced-Choice Questionnaires: A Common Framework. Psychometrika, 81(1), 135–160. DOI: 10.1007/s11336-014-9434-9
• Brown, A. & Maydeu-Olivares, A. (2013). How IRT can solve problems of ipsative data in forced-choice questionnaires. Psychological Methods, 18(1), 36-52. DOI: 10.1037/a0030641
• Brown, A. & Maydeu-Olivares, A. (2011). Item response modeling of forced-choice questionnaires. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 71(3), 460-502. DOI: 10.1177/0013164410375112
  

Current PhD students

• Miriam Fuechtenhans: In Pursuit of Process in Personality Prevarication: Developing a Model of Faking Behaviour.

Past PhD students

• Dr Yin Lin PhD Psychology (2020) ESRC funded: Asking the right questions: Increasing fairness and accuracy of personality assessments with Computerised Adaptive Testing
• Dr Ana Carla Crispim PhD Psychology (2018). Self-funded: Exploring the validity evidence of core affect

Anna welcomes contact from potential Doctoral students interested in modern psychometric modelling (structural equation modelling, questionnaire design, latent trait modelling, and similar).

Anna is happy to supervise final year and MSc projects related to:

1. Faking and impression management in high stakes assessments, for example: situational and personal characteristics linked to applicant ‘faking good’ on employment tests; or patient ‘faking bad’ on diagnostic tests for access to treatments; etc.
2. Unmotivated response biases and their impact on test validity, for example: acquiescence, leniency/severity, halo/horn effects etc.
3. Measurement of individuals differences, for example: factorial structure of personality constructs, equivalence of measurement models across groups, etc. 

• Chair of the University Research Ethics and Governance Committee (2018 - present)
• Member of the editorial board of the International Journal of Testing (2014 - present)
• Elected member of the Council of the International Test Commission (2012 - 2020)
• Chair of ITC Research and Guidelines Committee (2016 - 2020)
• Member of the Training Employability and Development (TED) committee of the South-East Network for Social Sciences (SeNNS) (2018 - 2020)
• Member of the Advisory Council for Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science (AMPPS) journal  2017 - 2021)

Grants and Awards