Biography

Professional biography

F.J. Oort studied Psychology at the University of Amsterdam, graduated in 1989, and obtained his PhD in 1996. He is especially interested in non-standard applications of structural equation modelling (SEM). SEM includes the latent variable modelling of mean and covariance structures. His thesis was about the application of SEM to item response theory and test construction. At Leiden University he studied the application of SEM to three-mode data, such as multitrait multimethod data, and multivariate longitudinal data. In 1999, he returned to the University of Amsterdam, to work as a statistician at the department of Medical Psychology of the Academic Medical Centre. In 2005 he was appointed as associate professor of Methods and Statistics at the Department of Education of the University of Amsterdam. Current interests include the integration of SEM with multi-level models,generalised linear models, exploratory factormodels, and item response models.

The focus of present research is “unbiased measurement” of psychological attributes in psychological and educational research. Many problems in psychometrics, such as item bias, test bias, response shift, culture bias, gender bias, response styles and tendencies, social desirability, etc., can be described as violations of “measurement invariance”. This enables a single general approach to these various problems, using SEM to test measurement invariance hypotheses.