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A History of the HaPI Database
Over 40 years of connecting researchers to the right instrument
First conceived in the early 1970s by Dr. Evelyn Perloff (1921-2022) at the University of Pittsburgh, the Health and Psychosocial Instruments (HaPI) database began in a file cabinet of folders containing measurement tools designed to assess a wide range of topics, including aggression, child behavior, cognitive impairment, health service utilization, mood disorders, pain, and psychological well-being.
Dr. Perloff witnessed how much time her graduate students spent seeking or constructing instruments to use in their research. She observed that all too often they were simply reinventing the wheel. Many times, suitable instruments already existed, although finding them was like searching for a needle in a haystack.
Reaching researchers around the world
The database grew in paper form for over a decade, shared among grateful colleagues who learned of it by word of mouth. With grant funding from the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Perloff founded Behavioral Measurement Database Services (BMDS) and launched HaPI in 1985. More than 40 years later, HaPI is distributed internationally by EBSCOhost and Ovid Technologies, through subscriptions to university libraries, medical schools, hospital systems, government agencies, and other research organizations. HaPI currently has over 255,000 records about health, behavioral, and psychosocial measurement tools, with 450 university subscribers in over 16 countries.
HaPI Insights: The Art and Science of Measurement
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