Instrumentation

Abstract

Abstract Chapter 20 of Discrepant Results in Mental Health Research outlines directions for future research on instrumentation in mental health research. In particular, the chapter is devoted to posing questions about traditional approaches to constructing instruments and in ways that suggest new approaches to instrument construction. Researchers who have studied discrepant results were forced to use instrumentation that was ill-prepared to index these discrepancies. Yet, this did not stop researchers from building the body of theoretical and empirical work discussed throughout this book. This signals that refining instrumentation so that it can precisely and accurately index discrepant results might boost the explanatory power of instrumentation in mental health. Along these lines, the chapter details how researchers might approach constructing instruments to accurately estimate discrepant results and how to test whether these instruments outperform those constructed using traditional approaches.