Instruments and tools

Page created 2.i.19, last update 9.x.21. 

Legalities

Legalities matter here. Most pages on the site are made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike Licence. Please feel free to reuse anything here but respect the licence, i.e. give attribution back to here. However, questionnaires and measurement tools are different and to ensure comparability of findings they should not be changed at all, including translation, without permission. If I provide an instrument here, it will be free to use, but please don’t abuse the work that went into creating them by changing them without the copyright holder’s permission. (The copyright holder isn’t always myself.) Please also if you are using any tools from here, do put an attribution pointing back to this site in any write up of your work.

What’s here

These are the links to main resources here.

Background

Even well before I came into the mental health arena I was fascinated by how it is that we scale and measure thoughts and feelings. This page takes you to some of my work in this area.

Other things and crosslinkages

  • As noted above, my main success in this area has been as a co-founder of the CORE system.  That’s more than just its instruments and measures and I maintain the CORE system web site at: https://www.coresystemtrust.org.uk/
  • I did quite a lot of the early work checking the psychometrics of PSYCHLOPS a hybrid measure with one nomothetic scaling question and three user-generated questions about problems and their impact.  I strongly recommend PSYCHLOPS as a complement to nomothetic mental health change measures though I’m not impressed by the common tendency to frame nomothetic and user-generated measures as competitors or polar opposites; to my mind they are complementaries, each addressing rather different questions.  If we and our clients have the time, I believe we should all be using one at least one nomothetic and at least one user generated or idiographic measure in parallel (though not necessarily to exactly the same rhythm).
  • I have intermittently worked with, and about, repertory grids.  I’ve done much less than I would have liked to but will be working more on that in the future so these have their own heading as well nesting here and they’re an example within what I call “rigorous idiography“, another area I hope to be returning to and developing.