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: the way the search 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 title that is exactly the phrase you typed in to find is hidden down the list of suggestions.

If what 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!

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PHQ-4

A four item self-report questionnaire made up of two items from the PHQ-9 and two…

Psychometrics

I guess this is mostly what I've worked on since about 1984 so of course…

Psychoanalytic theory and therapies

I have been putting this entry off! It's so hard, firstly, to guage the…

Path diagrams

I am someone who loves to see data: tables are lovely and I think, having…

Paradigms and paradigm shifts

"Paradigm" on its own can have a number of meanings I think but the term…

Positive specific agreement

Same thing as the F-measure Try also Agreement measures F-measure Inter-rater agreement/reliability Cohen's kappa Chapters Not covered in the OMbook. Online resources My Rblog…

PHQ-9 (Patient Health Questionnaire – 9 items)

Created in 2001 and now a very dominant self-report questionnaire. One of the mandatory…

PHQ-8

The eight item version of the Patient Health Questionnaire. The PHQ-9 with a final…

Partial correlation

This is simply the correlation between two variables after their correlation with another variable is…

Partial autocorrelation function (PACF)

Go to autocorrelation for the background and detail but this autocorrelation for lags of more…

More

Creation date lost, updated 19.v.24 to add the new BetterDocs “encyclopedia” listing of entries, tweaks 13.iv.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.