Finding Measures in the Behavioral Sciences and Education

This guide shows how to find measures in the behavioral sciences and education at the UTSA Libraries.

Helpful Terminology

Within the area of psychological testing, also called psychometrics, there are many terms used to refer to various test types. Below are some definitions of common types of measures taken from: Urbina, S. (2014). Essentials of Psychological Testing. Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons.

Psychological Test - a systematic procedure for obtaining samples of behavior, relevant cognitive or affective functioning, and for scoring and evaluating those samples according to standards. 

Personality Scale - instruments whose responses are neither evaluated nor scored as right-wrong or pass-fail but, rather, designed to elicit information about a person's motivations, preferences, attitudes, interests, opinions, emotional make-up, and characteristic reactions to people, situations, and other stimuli. Some examples are inventories, questionnaires, surveys, checklists, schedules, or projective techniques.

Scale - a group of items that pertain to a single variable and are arranged in order of difficulty or intensity.

Battery - a group of several tests, or subtests, that are administered at one time to a person. The term is also used to designate any group of individual tests specifically selected by a psychologist for use with a given client in an effort to answer a specific referral question, usually of a diagnostic nature.