Font Size: 

The successful transfer of research based knowledge to its practical application is a major task for psychological assessment. To judge the state of knowledge transfer, it is essential to know what instruments are being used in each domain. Though, German-speaking surveys only tell us about instruments used by practitioners in applied psychology (e.g. Hagemeister, Lang, & Kersting, 2010; Roth, Schmitt, & Herzberg, 2010); nothing about those used in research. This is why we wanted to identify the most frequently used instruments in German-speaking psychological research. To avoid some pitfalls of survey research, we chose a bibliometric approach.

To select instruments with a high standard of evaluation, we first conducted a systematic literature review on reliability and validity generalization studies (Schroth, Mayer, & Krampen, 2015). Using PsycINFO, PSYNDEX, MEDLINE, Eric and Web of Science, we thus identified 224 instruments in total, of which a German translation/adaptation existed for 135 instruments. In a second step we searched PSYNDEX for the usage of those 135 instruments. The database query resulted in 44 instruments being used more than a 100 times (31.1%). Most were clinical instruments (61.4%), personality tests (22.7%) and/or intelligence tests (11.4%). The Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), the Symptom Checklist-90 (SCL-90), the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) and the Wechsler Scales were used even more than a 1000 times.

Despite the great number of test constructions every year, it seems that quite a few instruments are worth the meta-analytical evaluation and even less of them are used frequently in research. Though, out of those 44 instruments used more than a 100 times, 12 were also mentioned in surveys by German practitioners. This is why we conclude that although research and practice may set different emphases in applying psychological tests, they do at least partly overlap.