Finding Measurement Instruments

Health and Psychosocial Instruments allows you to search by topic for measurement instruments that have been tested for validity and reliability.

Access Health and Psychosocial Instruments at the library homepage by clicking Databases A-Z and choosing the database by name from the A-Z list.

Search for instruments on a topic by typing appropriate keywords into the search boxes.  The image below illustrates a search for instruments that measure job satisfaction of nurses.

 nurs* will retrieve nurse, nurses, nursing

 

Click the title of a measurement instrument to get more information:

Note that the full text of the instrument is very rarely found in the database. The reference that you find usually leads to the article that the authors published to show reliability and validity of their instrument:

 

After you have the titles of instruments that interest you, switch to Dissertations and Theses Global Database, also available at the library homepage under Databases A-Z.

Do a search for the instrument by title.  Place the title in quotation marks and change the field indicator to Abstract - AB.

 

Access the full text of the dissertations (if available) in which the instrument was used by clicking the Full Text-PDF link:

 

After opening the dissertation, check the table of contents. Often, the author of the dissertation will include the full text of the instrument in an appendix. Many instruments are freely available and can be found this way.

 

However, note that in this case, the instrument is not freely available without permission of the instrument developer, and that the author of the dissertation was permitted to include only a sample of the instrument. Some developers require payment for their instrument and will not permit the full text to be reproduced in a dissertation.

 

Some instruments are also freely available on the Web, so try a Google search too. You might hit it lucky!