PsycTests is the best starting place for finding measures by topic
NOTE BEFORE YOU START ~ Only search for one topic per measure. Example: If in your project you want to look at religious and political beliefs - find one measure for religious beliefs and one for political.
STEP ONE ~ Determine Keywords for what you want to measure
1. Start with your own ideas for keywords
Example: If you want to measure the strength of someone - you might generate the keywords:
strength and religious belief
2. Search for those terms in PsycTests.
3. Use the results to see what other terms might work
Example: If you searched for strength and religious belief your results list would include these measures :
So you would know to try terms like religiosity or faith in your search
STEP TWO ~ Determine what limits will help. Limits are options in psyc tests that will filter your results list to items that might be more useful to you.
Commercially Available ~ I encourage you to check NO for this option. Commercially available tests are very difficult to get and have tighter restrictions on who can administer them, even in an academic setting.
Full Text Limit ~ You can limit to just those measures or tests that are in PsycTests in Full Text. Keep in mind : the best mesaure may not be in Full Text. And that doesn't mean you can't use it, it will just take extra steps. If you are doing a topic that is commonly studied with a test or measure, then this can be a good option to start If you are searching to measure something more obscure then you probably don't want to do this.
Test Year ~ You can limit to a range of years if you only want to look at more recent measures
Age Group ~ You can limit to a particular age group - but many measures can be applied to multiple different groups. I would only use this if you feel the measure would be significantly different if it was for a different group. So, you might want to use this if your population group was children. But if your population group was college students, you would not necessarily want to restrict to just measure that indicated that population
Gender - you can limit to a particular gender - but again many measures can be used for either, so that even if you restrict your project to a specific gender, the tests doesn't have to be restricted to that.
STEP THREE ~ Search Psyc Tests using the terms and limits you identified.
Set your limit of Commercial Availability=NO first
Then type in search
Note you might want to combine similar terms with OR,
Example:
Religiosity
OR
Strength and religious and ( belief or faith)
Or you might want to do 3 separate searches
1. Religiosity
2. Strength and religious and belief
3. Strength and religious and faith
STEP FOUR ~ Sort through your results, read all the information, and determine which measure you think will work best for you
Note: You may want to do then next section - Finding the primary article - for several tests and make your decision after reviewing the article.