Professor Anna Brown

Professor Anna Brown is a psychometrician with an established reputation and extensive industry experience, providing psychometric advice to organisations and individuals.
Anna is an Honorary Professor at the University of Kent, where she conducted research and taught internationally acclaimed courses in psychological methods and statistics for over 12 years. Previously, she taught short courses in Applied Psychometrics at the University of Cambridge. Her experiences outside of academia included research and test development at the Research Division of the UK largest occupational test publisher SHL Group, where she held senior and principal psychometrician positions 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. Further advances in this methodology made by Dr Brown enabled the development of novel personality assessment tools that are resistant to response biases and ‘faking good’ by candidates, including an IRT-scored version of Occupational Personality Questionnaire (OPQ32r), the Character Skills Snapshot, the Leadership Styles Questionnaire and many others. Multiple world-leading test publishers and organisations, including SHL, Korn Ferry, and many others incorporated this methodology into millions of individual psychological assessments that have taken place in at least 37 different languages, across 40 different countries since 2010.
Professor Brown has extensive experience in designing, developing and implementing psychometric testing solutions in the workplace, health settings and education, and provides psychometric advice to organisations in the private and public sectors internationally. She served as an elected member on the Council of the International Test Commission (ITC) for 8 years. She also served as a member of the editorial Board of the International Journal of Testing, Organisational Research Methods, and as an ad-hoc reviewer for countless journals in the field of psychological testing. 

Anna’s research focuses on psychological measurement and testing, particularly issues in test validity and test fairness. She specialises in modelling response biases and faking, scaling of comparative data, measurement invariance and other measurement models using Item Response Theory (IRT) and Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) frameworks more broadly. She has published widely on these and other methodology topics, producing numerous journal articles, book chapters, psychometric tests and test manuals, many published in top methodology journals such as Psychometrika, Psychological Methods, etc.

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
  

Past PhD students

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

Grants and Awards