I provide consultation in my areas of expertise to individuals, research teams, and organizations.  This expertise includes:

  • Career exploration (how to help people figure out what occupation and education/training is right for them)
  • Help-seeking (treatment utilization, stigma, barriers to care, healthcare access, psychosocial factors)
  • Psychometrics (bifactor CFA, scale development, and online survey research)

I am particularly interested in providing this expertise in the context of interprofessional, extramurally-funded research.  Contact me and we can discuss possibilities.

Below, I provide additional detail about two topics: career exploration and instrument development.

Career Exploration

Most of us are never taught how to systematically explore career paths so that we can pick the one that fits our interests, talents, and life situation.  My profession of counseling psychology has been a historical and modern leader in using evidence-based strategies for helping people figure out what occupation and education/training is the best fit for them.  My professional training and experience have culminated in the development of the Systematic Career Exploration Approach (SCEA).  The SCEA is a self-guided version of the professionally-guided approach that I’ve used to help hundreds of people explore career paths.  I bring this experience to bear by providing consultation on how to facilitate career exploration.

Instrument Development

It is easy to create a set of items, call it a scale, and add the scores of all items together to create a total score.  It is much harder to create an instrument that provides reliable and valid scores that truly measure the thing you are trying to measure.

This is why there is a whole field called Psychometrics, which is dedicated to the objective measurement of knowledge, abilities, attitudes, personality traits, educational achievement, and other psychological constructs.  My program of research draws upon best practices in psychometrics to develop and refine instruments measuring everything from stigma to spirituality.  Having learned a good deal about the do’s and don’ts of measurement, I now offer consultation in this area.

Here is a list of situations in which you may find it helpful to enlist my expertise.  You are trying to…

  • determine whether existing instruments are “valid and reliable enough” to use, or whether a new, better instrument should be created
  • develop a new multi-item instrument grounded in extant research and theory
  • develop a robust item pool t that measures all aspects of the construct’s content domain
  • pick a response format (e.g., dichotomous, Likert, semantic differential) and the optimal number of response options
  • solicit expert feedback to establish content evidence of validity
  • pilot test instrument with population of interest to ensure respondents can clearly comprehend the instructions, format, and item content
  • figure out how many factors the instrument has
  • determine whether the construct measured by the instrument is truly multidimensional, or just multifaceted and “essentially unidimensional” (in which case bifactor methods are needed; see Bifactor Analysis section below)
  • select the best items to measure each factor, while balancing reliability, validity, and brevity considerations
  • investigate the internal consistency (e.g., Cronbach’s Alpha, Omega) and test-retest reliability of the scores
  • provide evidence that your subscale scores are uniquely reliable and provide added value beyond the total score
  • use extant literature to articulate a nomological net for the construct the instrument is designed to measure and to generate testable hypotheses regarding the instrument scores’ relationship with theoretically-related variables
  • provide concurrent, predictive, incremental, convergent, or divergent evidence of validity for the instrument’s scores
  • justify scale development decisions in response to reviewer criticism
  • create a “short form” of an instrument that appropriately measures the construct, but with fewer items to reduce participant response burden
  • explore the possibility of developing a unidimensional short form of an originally-multidimensional instrument