APA PsycTests® is APA’s database that provides descriptive summaries, full text, and relevant citations on the development and assessment of tests and measures that can be used in research and teaching.

Every APA PsycTests record includes a test profile with dozens of descriptive fields such as test name, summary, construct measured, permission, and reliability.

The full-text test can be found as a linked PDF in about half of APA PsycTests records.

Some APA PsycTests records also include an additional link for supporting documentation.

These are a few of the types of Supporting Documentation that can help you administer a test or analyze the data gathered:

• Answer Sheet
• Directions/Instructions
• Instructor/Test Manual/Guide
• Norms/Analyses

When searching APA PsycTests on its own, you will see an option on the advanced search page to limit your results to a particular type of Supporting Documentation.

When the original test author and publisher have granted APA permission, the supporting documentation will be included with the full text of the test as part of the APA PsycTests record.

If you have questions about supporting documentation that aren’t answered in the test record, you can always:

• check the Correspondence field for author contact information or
• check the Source Used field for a doi link to the original full-text publication that developed the test.

The screenshots above show how these fields appear in the APA PsycNET version of APA PsycTests.  

You can see how this looks on EBSCOhost, Ovid, or ProQuest in this step-by-step guide.

APA PsycTests^® can help you find an existing test that you can reuse in your own research. In doing so, you may want to evaluate the psychometric data that were reported by the original test developer.  

Psychometrics is the branch of psychology that studies the quantification and measurement of mental attributes, behavior, and performance, as well as the design, analysis, and improvement of the tests and other instruments used in such measurement.  

You will find three types of psychometrics included in an APA PsycTests record, when the information is provided by the original author and publisher of the test.  

• Reliability describes the consistency of scores across contexts (e.g., different times, items, or raters), and provides an estimate of the amount of score variance that is due to true variance between subjects rather than to error.  
• Validity is the degree to which a test or instrument is capable of measuring the stated construct, rather than some other trait or concept.   
• Factor Analysis is a broad family of mathematical procedures that reduce a set of interrelations among stated factors to a smaller set of unobserved latent factors.  

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