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!

D

DALYs: Disability Adjusted Life Years

OK, time I dived into health economic terms! Details DALYs are an extension of QALYs: Quality…

Data protection

Well of course you'd look after your data wouldn't you? You don't want anyone…

Dataset and database

See sample to read why I think we should be using "dataset" instead of "sample". A…

DBRCT = Double Blind, Randomised Controlled Trial

[This entry overlaps with many others, see links] A randomised controlled trial is a way of…

De-anonymisation

Synonym of re-identification, see, anonymisation, pseudonymisation, confidentiality and smallest identical subset for more on this…

Degrees of freedom (d.f.)

A key if slightly slippy idea that comes up in a lot of statistical analyses….

Dependent variable

Though there are statistical methods that handle relationships between many variables, very often we look…

Derangement(s)

Things are deranged if they are out of order. Interestingly, whether we can put…

Descriptive statistics

This covers statistical methods of summarising a dataset that aim only to summarise the data…

Diagnosis

Clearly the idea comes out of medicine and what is sometimes called "the medical model"…

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.