Calibration of measures for psychotherapy outcome studies.
Many findings in psychology, including those in psychotherapy, lack interpretability because measures are not in any meaningful metric. Measures need to be calibrated so as to endow them with inherent meaning. In particular, it is important to calibrate measures against behaviors and real events in people's lives. Approaches to calibrating measures include calibration against direct personal experience, against cross-experiential equivalents, and against cross-modal equivalents, to reflect empirically established behavioral implications as well as just noticeable differences in behavior or between people. Psychological measures may never be as closely calibrated as those for physical properties, but wider reporting of unstandardized regression equations would be of great help. Psychological measures also need to be calibrated against each other so as to permit easy transformations of values or substitutions of measures. Finally, greater standardization of measures is recommended so as to produce better bases for calibration.
Sechrest
L
L
Department of Psychology, University of Arizona, Tueson 85721, USA. sechrest@aruba.ccit.arizona.edu
McKnight
P
P
McKnight
K
K
D006801:Humans; D001523:Mental Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000523:psychology / Q000628:therapy*; D017063:Outcome Assessment, Health Care; D010555:Personality Inventory / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D011594:Psychometrics; D011613:Psychotherapy; D011785:Quality Assurance, Health Care; D016896:Treatment Outcome