Measurement in Health Psychology Research

Health psychology has always held the promise of both a methodologically rigorous basic science and applications for the improvement of health and well-being. Early in the development of the field, book-length discussions illustrated convincingly that scientifically sound approaches to measurement were essential in health psychology’s basic and applied agendas (Karoly, 1985; Keefe & Blumenthal, 1982). With increasing methodological sophistication, there has been remarkable progress in fulfilling this dual promise of health psychology (Smith, Kendall, & Keefe, 2002; Smith & Suls, 2004).