How does the
MentalRoutine assessment work?

What are the eight domains?

Every shot runs through three phases: Pre-Shot (preparation), Swing (execution) and Post-Shot (processing). The eight domains are the measurable steps within those three phases.

What are the four influencing factors, and how do they differ from the domains?

Around the eight domains sit four factors: pressure & stress, practice experience, risk appetite and resilience. These are not steps in your routine — they are the conditions that determine whether your routine holds up when it matters.

They don't count towards your Mental Index, but they explain much of which domains wobble first for you under pressure. Each factor has a number of sub-factors of its own.

What do the domains and factors build on?

The eight domains and four factors aren't an invention made up for golf. They build on an underlying measurement model for generic soft skills — attitudes, ways of thinking, ways of behaving and fundamental values — developed over fifteen years of behavioural research and assessment development within organisations and with individuals.

That underlying model measures the individual skills that are then summarised in golf-specific terms: every domain and every factor is a sum of a number of those underlying skills, using the same normative and ipsative mechanism described in chapter 3.

Focus, for example, rests on a different combination of underlying attitudes and ways of thinking than Trust. So you're not answering eight separate golf-specific questions — you're answering questions traced back to a validated layer of generic skills, which is then translated into your eight domains and four factors. That extra layer is exactly what gives the model its sharpness: the questions measure something already proven to discriminate, not something invented for the occasion.

The two axes: performance and development

Every domain score is built from two axes that together determine how that score comes about.

That's why a score is more than a snapshot of your current level: it also indicates how much you can actually shift on that domain. Precisely that distinction sits underneath the choice you'll meet later in your Training Report between “improve” and “leverage” — not a choice based on how high or low a number happens to fall, but on where real movement is available to you.

Why does the assessment use two kinds of questions?

Not every question in the assessment works the same way. We use a combination of normative and ipsative questions — a deliberate choice that determines how sharp your scores end up being.

In a normative question you rate one statement on its own, independent of the rest, on an absolute scale — the way most questionnaires work. That's quick to complete, but vulnerable to what psychometrics calls socially desirable responding: the tendency to rate yourself average to high on almost every individual item, because nothing forces a choice between items.

So other questions work ipsatively, through a forced-choice format: you get a fixed number of points — ten — to distribute across several statements at once. If you want one aspect to score higher, another has to come out lower.

Where normative scores are relative to an external norm or population, ipsative scores are relative to each other, within that person's own answer pattern: they say nothing about how strong you are compared to other golfers, but everything about which aspect weighs most heavily for you relative to the rest. There's no escape into “I score an 8 on everything” — the points system forces a ranking.

That mechanism is exactly what you need for questions where several aspects have to be weighed against each other — for instance when you indicate how much weight risk, patience and self-belief each carry in your decision on a difficult shot. A normative question would produce three separate, possibly all-high scores. The ipsative question forces a ranking — and that ranking is what exposes your real profile.

How is the model statistically validated, with so many ipsative variables?

Ipsative data carries a well-known psychometric challenge: because the points within one question always add up to a fixed total, the scores within that question are by definition not independent of each other — a higher score on one aspect mathematically pushes another down. That makes classical validation methods, such as internal consistency or direct score comparison between people, hard to apply to purely ipsative data.

That's exactly why the model combines normative with ipsative questions instead of using forced-choice alone. The normative items restore comparability between people — on an absolute scale one person genuinely can score higher than another — while the ipsative items provide the within-person sharpness that makes social desirability impossible.

For purely ipsative data there are also specific statistical techniques, notably Thurstonian IRT models for forced-choice data. These convert the forced distribution of points into underlying scores that are comparable across people. Weights — how heavily an item counts towards the underlying characteristic it's meant to measure — play a major role: only once that weighting has been carefully established for every item does converting a forced choice into a reliable underlying score hold up.

Not on one validated academic taxonomy that distinguishes exactly these eight steps and four factors as separate constructs — that arrangement, with these labels and these boundaries, is MentalRoutine's own applied synthesis.

What does sit underneath are several research traditions from sport psychology and psychology more broadly, each with its own evidence base, partly golf-specific.

The four influencing factors

Each of these traditions supplies part of the scientific basis under one or more of the eight domains or four factors. The model itself — eight domains within three phases, plus the four influencing factors — is MentalRoutine's own applied translation on top of that research base, tested on more than 1,000 golfers, from handicap 0 to 36+.