Self-report instruments available to the public

[RxPsych]

Inspired by the autism screener thread, is anyone concerned about how many of the self-report measures often used in clinical practice are widely available online? Not only the availability of the tests themselves, but all scoring information is available as well. BAI, BDI-II, autism screeners, ADHD questionnaires, MMSE, MoCA, etc.

Do the test developers simply not care, or are they intended to be publicly accessible? Does this influence anyone's use of these measures in practice?

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[WisNeuro]

Most of the freely available measures are essentially face valid lists of symptoms. Nothing is really given away here. As for cognitive screeners, I don't rely on those scores anyway, the false negative/positive rates are simply too high to be useful for anything involving my work.

 

[AcronymAllergy]

Agree with the above. Most of the measures you've referenced are very face-valid and anyone wanting to try to appear a certain way could probably do so even without advanced access to the measures.

I do think test security as a whole is a substantial issue in psychology, in part because there's a not-insubstantial number of psychologists who believe many people other than psychologists (e.g., attorneys, claimants in medicolegal cases) should all have access to testing materials and data. But I don't think the average person being able to look up an ASRS or BAI ahead of time falls into this category.