OM book glossary

This is the glossary, over 300 entries and climbing, for the book “Outcome measures and evaluation in counselling and psychotherapy” written by myself and Jo-anne Carlyle and available now from SAGE. 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!

D

Domains, dimensions, components and factors

This is my way of clarifying some terms that are often thrown around in psychometrics….

Dose response

One of too many terms that have been pulled across from physical health medicine and…

Descriptive statistics

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

Divergent/discriminant validity

With convergent validity, this is part of concurrent validity, it's whether values on a measure…

Data protection

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

Dispersion

I've been putting this off! It's actually quite a basic idea but it covers…

Diagnosis

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

De-anonymisation

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

Distribution shape

It's useful to think of distributions of continuous variables in terms of their "central location",…

Discrete measures/variables

A variable that can only take distinct values. Examples might included the locality within a…

More

Page last updated 19.v.24 to add the new BetterDocs “encyclopedia” listing of entries. Author CE, page and all glossary contents are copyright to me. That may change to a Creative Commons licence later when I am happier with the content.