Psychological Tests and Health Measures
Psychological tests and health measures are standardized assessments of targeted psychological or health states like personality, intelligence, mobility or quality of life.
Locating appropriate and reliable psychology tests, measures, and scales can be challenging, and you often have to rely on trial and error. Below are some tips on how to navigate the related resources depending on your information need.
Disclaimer: many tests and measures used in psychological and health assessments are not available to the public. Restricting access to researchers and professionals preserves the test validity and reduces false results. Some tests may also restricted for copyright and licensing reasons; such tests require a fee for access.
If you find a scale/test/measure and need to check it's reliable and validated, search:
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Mental Measurements Yearbook with Tests in Print (MMY - EBSCO)
" Produced by the Buros Institute of Mental Measurements at the University of Nebraska, the Mental Measurements Yearbook™ (MMY) provides users with a comprehensive guide to over 2,000 contemporary testing instruments. Designed for an audience ranging from novice test consumers to experienced professionals, the MMY series contains information essential for a complete evaluation of test products within such diverse areas as psychology, education, business, and leadership. All MMY entries contain descriptive information (e.g., test purpose, publisher, pricing) and edited review(s) written by leading content area experts. To be included in the MMY, a test must be commercially available, be published in the English language, and be new or revised since it last appeared in the series. First published by Oscar K. Buros, the MMY series allows users to make knowledgeable judgments and informed selection decisions about the increasingly complex world of testing. MMY provides coverage from Volume 9 to the present."
Permitted Use | Subscribed multi-user unlimited access
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PsycINFO (American Psychological Association; APA - EBSCO)
PsycINFO is an abstracting and indexing database of more than 2000 journals (approximately 3.3 million records) devoted to peer-reviewed literature (journals, books and dissertations) in the behavioural sciences and mental health.
Permitted Use | Subscribed multi-user unlimited access | 1887-Current
If you have a topic or the name and need to find similar scales/tests/measures, search:
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PsycTESTS (American Psychological Association; APA - EBSCO)
PsycTESTS®, produced by the American Psychological Association (APA), serves as a repository for a growing selection of psychological tests and measures, including thousands of actual test instruments and test items that are available for immediate download and use in research and teaching.International in scope, PsycTESTS also provides access to an increasing number of tests that are available in languages other than English. PsycTESTS is an authoritative source of structured information about tests of relevance to psychologists and professionals in related fields such as psychiatry, management, business, education, social science, neuroscience, law, medicine, and social work. While focused on contemporary instances of test use, coverage spans more than a century.
Subscribed multi-user unlimited access | 1910-Current
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Health and Psychosocial Instruments (HaPI : EBSCO)
Health and Psychosocial Instruments is a bibliographic database with abstracts produced by Behavioral Measurement Database Services (BMDS). It is used to find citations to and information about information-gathering tools for clinicians, such as questionnaires, interview schedules, tests, checklists, rating and other scales, coding schemes, and projective techniques. Over 2/3 of the tools are in medical and nursing areas such pain measurement, quality of life assessment, and drug efficacy evaluation.The database contains citations to actual test documents that copyright holders authorize BMDS to make available; bibliographic citations to journal articles which contain information about specific test instruments; and a catalog of commercial test publishers and their available instruments.
Permitted Use | Subscribed multi-user unlimited access | 1985-Current
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Mental Measurements Yearbook with Tests in Print (MMY - EBSCO)
" Produced by the Buros Institute of Mental Measurements at the University of Nebraska, the Mental Measurements Yearbook™ (MMY) provides users with a comprehensive guide to over 2,000 contemporary testing instruments. Designed for an audience ranging from novice test consumers to experienced professionals, the MMY series contains information essential for a complete evaluation of test products within such diverse areas as psychology, education, business, and leadership. All MMY entries contain descriptive information (e.g., test purpose, publisher, pricing) and edited review(s) written by leading content area experts. To be included in the MMY, a test must be commercially available, be published in the English language, and be new or revised since it last appeared in the series. First published by Oscar K. Buros, the MMY series allows users to make knowledgeable judgments and informed selection decisions about the increasingly complex world of testing. MMY provides coverage from Volume 9 to the present."
Permitted Use | Subscribed multi-user unlimited access
PsycTests, HaPI, and MMY are tools dedicated to making tests easier to find and review. They make an excellent first stop when doing this kind of research.
Research aid: Searching in HaPI
If you found a scale/test/measure and need the full-text, search:
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PsycINFO (American Psychological Association; APA - EBSCO)
PsycINFO is an abstracting and indexing database of more than 2000 journals (approximately 3.3 million records) devoted to peer-reviewed literature (journals, books and dissertations) in the behavioural sciences and mental health.
Permitted Use | Subscribed multi-user unlimited access | 1887-Current
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Dissertations & Theses (ProQuest PQDT)
"Searchable and browsable database of dissertations and theses from around the world, spanning from 1743 to the present day. It also offers full text for graduate works added since 1997, along with selected full text for works written prior to 1997. It contains a significant amount of new international dissertations and theses both in citations and in full text. Includes citations for dissertations and theses from around the world, ranging from 1861 to those accepted last semester. Dissertations published from 1980 forward include 350-word abstracts; master's theses from 1988 forward include 150-word abstracts. Digital dissertations and theses are archived as submitted by the degree-granting institution. Designated as an official offsite repository for the U.S. Library of Congress, PQDT Global offers comprehensive historic and ongoing coverage for North American works and significant and growing international coverage from a multiyear program of expanding partnerships with international universities and national associations."
All PhD dissertations and Master's theses from depositing universities are available from 1997 onwards, unless the document's author has requested a temporary delay.
It is also possible to search within an interface exclusive to Dissertations & Theses @ University of New Brunswick.
For UNB theses submitted after 2012, please consult UNB’s institutional repository,
UNB Scholar, or the library catalogue, UNBWorldCat.
Permitted Use | Subscribed multi-user unlimited access | 1743-Current
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CINAHL with Full Text (Cumulative Index to Nursing & Allied Health Literature - EBSCO)
CINAHL with Full Text is the world's most comprehensive source of full text for nursing & allied health journals, providing full text for more than 500 journals indexed in CINAHL. This authoritative file contains full text for many of the most used journals in the CINAHL index - with no embargo. With full-text coverage dating back to 1981, CINAHL with Full Text is the definitive research tool for all areas of nursing and allied health literature.
Permitted Use | Subscribed multi-user unlimited access | 1981-Current
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Medline (1950 to Present)
"MEDLINE® is the United States National Library of Medicine's (NLM®) premier bibliographic database providing information from the following fields: Medicine, Nursing, Dentistry, Veterinary medicine, Allied health, and Pre-clinical sciences. As well, MEDLINE is the primary source of global information from international literature on biomedicine, including the following topics as they relate to biomedicine and health care: Biology, Environmental science, Marine biology, Plant and animal science, Biophysics, and Chemistry."
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Google scholar
Google Scholar searches a subset of the Web that Google has classified as "scholarly literature". They do not publish a list of chosen sites, and they do not state how often sites are checked. Some important sources are not covered at all. Thus, Google Scholar alone should not be relied on for comprehensive research.
In databases like these you can often find scales/tests/measures in the appendix of full-text articles or as supplemental material. You may also want to search Google for PDFs.
Just remember: not all authors have made the full-text freely available, and often there is a cost to purchase full-text. It may also an option to contact the author and ask if they would share the scale/test/measure with you.
Books as a source for information on / access to psychological tests and health measures:
There are many books on research methodology and assessment in the library catalogue, some of which contain psychological tests and health measures. You can locate books on these topics using searching for your topic along with test-related terms like: instruments, measuring, assessing / assessment, questionnaires, inventories, rating scales, checklists, and tests.
A few notes about Mental Measurements Yearbook (MMY):
- This is a book that appears in a database format, and is only updated when new volumes are added (vol. 20, 2017 is the most current)
- Most useful to search if you know the name of the test/scale, but not every one will be listed
- Most useful for getting a description of the test/scale, details on its development, reliability/validity, and commentary
- Does not include the full-text of the test/scale
