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!

S

Scree plot

Falling out of much use across the 21st Century but you may still see it….

Statistical assumptions

All too often, particularly in our field, statistical reports are treated as definitive answers and…

Satterthwaite correction/equation

This is pretty small print. You may also see this as the Satterthwaite-Welch correction/equation Details This…

S value/index, self-information, surprisal

I think this may be the index with more names than any other, s-value, s-index…

Sten scores

I had never come across these until I was reminding myself about stanines. Stanine…

Stanines & the stanine transformation/scoring

I remember reading about these, hm, some time in the 1980s I suspect when I…

Seven point summaries

Well this is really small print but it's an absolute joy for an amateur statistics…

Standard error (SE)

Not to be confused with standard deviation (SD). Details Really understanding the difference between SD and SE…

SED: Sensory and quasi-sensory Experiences of the Deceased

The latest in a long series of names for these phenomena. This one has…

Social desirability

In our fields this refers to a bias that can affect self-report particularly on questionnaires…

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.