OM book glossary

This is the glossary for the book “Outcome measures and evaluation in counselling and psychotherapy” written by myself and Jo-anne Carlyle and available now from SAGE. I am over 430 entries now and still climbing though now (April 2026) I am concentrating more on harmonising, cleaning up and cross-linking existing entries than I am on adding new ones. Some glossary entries link to more detailed expansions of the topic in my Rblog and, at last, an increasing number now link with interactive online (“shiny”) apps.

You can see the alphabetical list of entries below which is a good place to browse, or you can use this search box.

Beware if you are searching, the way that the plugin orders the matches is to my mind bizarre so scroll down if what you typed isn’t first on the list, you may find something with exactly the word or phrase you typed in to find is hidden further down the list of suggestions. As of 29.ix.26 the plugin authors are aware and working on this.

As to the content, if a topic you want is not there and you think it should be, contact me and tell me and I will put it on the (long!) list of entries to be added!

A

Abstracteeism

A neologism created by Branca Sa Pires and leapt upon by me in one of…

Accuracy

What it means in everyday language really. It's one of two parts of observational…

Age

We all know what age is so why put it here?! Because it's a…

Aggregation

Aggregation in OM refers to the bringing together of data for the purposes of statistical…

Alpha

First letter of the Greek alphabet. OK, OK, I know you knew that! It…

Alternative (alternate) hypothesis

The logical alternative to the null hypothesis in NHST (Null Hypothesis Significance Testing). At…

Analysis of covariance (ANCOVA)

A very simple extension of the ANOVA model. Instead of analysing the values of…

Analysis of variance (ANOVA)

This is a huge family of statistical analyses within the NHST (Null Hypothesis Significance Test…

Anderson-Darling test

A good test of distribution fit. (That's a graphic from my Rblog post about…

Anonymisation

This sounds obvious doesn't it and it also seems obvious that clients, and research participants,…

More

Creation date lost, last updated 19.ix.26. Author CE; this page and all glossary contents are copyright to me so contact me if you want to quote from them (I’m sure I’ll agree!). That may change to a Creative Commons licence later when I am happier with the content.