1.5 Intended audience

We aim for three broad audiences:

• Professionals in the field of child growth and development;
• Policymakers in international settings;
• Statisticians, methodologists, and data scientists.

Professionals in child development are constantly faced with the problem that different instruments for measuring child development yield incomparable scores. This chapter introduces and illustrates sound psychometric techniques for extracting comparable scores from existing instruments. We hope that our approach will ease communication between professionals.

Policymakers in international settings are looking for simple, versatile, and cheap instruments to gain insight into the effectiveness of interventions. The ability to measure child development by a single number enhances priority setting and leads to a more accurate understanding of policy effects.

The text may appeal to statisticians and data scientists for the simplicity of the concepts, for the (somewhat unusual) application of statistical models to discard data, for the ease of interpretation of the result, and for the availability of software.