How to read this registry

Every convention in the registry exists to stop a reader over-trusting a number. This page is the method.

The grade scale

Each property carries one of High Moderate Low Very low, or one of two non-grades: Absent, meaning no published evidence was located, which is reported as a finding about the literature; and Not applicable, meaning the property is a category error for the instrument's type (a single item has no internal consistency to report). The two non-grades are deliberately distinct: absence is information, not-applicable is taxonomy, and a registry that lets them blur misleads exactly the reader it exists to protect.

The four status tokens

The grade says how strong the evidence is; the status says what kind of literature produced it: well-established a mature, replicated evidence base; contested credible published disagreement (this badge is displayed prominently on record pages, never buried); thin few studies, small samples, or narrow settings; untested the specific claim has not been directly examined. Moderate-and-contested and Moderate-and-thin are different situations that previously shared a word; here they never do.

Indirectness: who the grade is for

Grades are for a UK working-adult audience, not bibliometric totals. Every grade carries an indirectness flag: direct evidence from UK working adults or close; indirect evidence earned in other populations or settings, with the grade already downgraded for it. A large clinical literature does not entitle an instrument to a High grade for workplace use; the flag is where that discipline lives. A record-level deployment context caveat, where present, states once anything that cuts across every property (for example a clinical-origin instrument deployed in a workplace) and is shown at the top of the evidence section.

Evidence-form provenance

Every grade names what the evidence was earned on: canonical (the fielded instrument, as versioned), derivative (a named reworded or short form), parent (a longer parent form), or mixed. Borrowed evidence can no longer be silently read as evidence for the fielded instrument.

Criterion validity is two properties, never one

Validity against a diagnostic or health reference standard and validity against organisational outcomes (absence, turnover, performance) diverge so sharply across this registry that a merged grade actively misleads, in exactly the direction that harms a workplace reader. They are graded separately everywhere, by schema rule.

Test-retest is structured, not prose

Retest findings are recorded as structured entries (coefficient, coefficient type, interval, sample, population), so bundled ICCs and internal-consistency contamination cannot pass as stability evidence. This is the property the registry found weakest across the entire instrument set.

Licence currency

Licence status is verified against the steward's current distribution terms, with the verification date shown on every record. Founding papers and review literature are never acceptable licence sources; that rule was learned publicly (correction C-0001) and is now schema law. Where a steward's terms could not yet be verified, the record says so plainly and displays no settled status.

The corrections policy

Disputed or wrong statements in published records are checked and fixed publicly: every correction carries the old value, the new value, and the source that settled it, on the corrections and verifications page. A registry that corrected itself silently would be indistinguishable from one that was never wrong; the log is the difference.

What this registry is not

It is not part of the normative OWHS specification, it does not recommend instruments, it does not advise what to measure, and it never reproduces instrument item text. It describes the published evidence so that whoever chooses can choose with their eyes open.