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!

L

Latent variables

Any variable that cannot be measured directly but is presumed to be indicated by things…

LD-CORE

Self-report measure influenced by the design of the CORE-OM and co-developed with adults users of…

League tables

Used a lot in sport! Basically ranking things, typically in our field, services, by…

Left censored data

Censored data (see entry) is data where at least some values are not know accurately…

Likelihood ratio

This is a powerful way of expressing how much observing something makes the probability of…

Likert scale

I confess that I have been avoiding doing this definition because I'm uneasy about whether…

Linear versus non-linear processes/relationships

An important distinction that is essentially mathematical. As the name suggests this is about…

LISREL

Small entry but seems right to honour it. Details One of the first, if not the first,…

Loading

You will see this term in factor, principal component and linear regression analyses. There is…

Log(s) = logarithms

This is a funny one because I suspect that people who liked school maths (or…

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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.