This is a great question. I think there is a short answer and long answer. The short answer is not necessarily. The long answer is that I believe the more important thing is to be as specific as possible when describing which instruments we use. Edlin et al. (2015) wrote an excellent paper pointing out how bad our field is at specifying how we measure handedness. As you point out, a lot of people claim to use the "EHI," but very few people use Oldfield's original version and we rarely report how we've modified it. I think the first step is to push for careful reporting of what items are on our questionnaires, which response formats we use, the reliability statistics of our questionnaires, etc. If someone is going to modify the EHI, that's fine. But we should be able to reconstruct their scale based on the method's section of any paper that uses the modified version. I gave a talk about this topic at APS in Boston. I have attached my slides to this response. The reason I think being more specific is more important that standardization at this stage is that I believe that our measures of handedness are still crude enough that we occasionally get different results depending on the questionnaire used and whether people are looking at left vs. right handedness, consistent vs. inconsistent handedness, or a cross. I personally believe that part of psychology's replicability crisis stems from the fact that two different psychologists might use two questionnaires with different psychometric properties, but speak as though they are measuring the same thing. For example, two psychologists could call two different measures "handedness," but one is using a forced choice questionnaire with five times and the other is using a 5-level response instrument with 30 tasks. What we haven't figured out, theoretically, is if these two questionnaires are each used as a predictor for the same criterion variable and yield conflicting or inconsistent results, is it because one measure is better or because the two questionnaires are not useful for measuring the same thing? It could be the case that the 5 item forced choice questionnaire is as good as the longer item for classifying left vs. right handers. In that case, the 5 item questionnaire is superior because it's as accurate, but with the added benefit of being brief and easier to score. However, the longer questionnaire may be better for studies looking at consistency of handedness. Depending on your research question, you will want a different instrument.

References

Edlin, J. M., Leppanen, M. L., Fain, R. J., Hackländer, R. P., Hanaver-Torrez, S. D., & Lyle, K. B. (2015). On the use (and misuse?) of the Edinburgh Handedness Inventory. Brain and cognition, 94, 44-51.

I read your excellent answer and attached pptx with great interest. You are right that Edlin et al (2015)'s evidence shows that adopting the EHI would only be a first step in addressing the replicability issue (less of a crisis I would say for handedness research but still a problem). You are also right that research on consistency as opposed to direction of handedness would probably be hampered rather than facilitated by adopting a standard instrument. I hope you would agree that the evidence for medical relevance of the former is as yet much weaker than for the latter. But the prime motivation for preferring multi-item instruments rather than self-classification or writing hand alone was surely the confirmation that many people are inconsistent (or "mixed") in their handedness. Your research on this with Stephen Christman and others may well be the "modern turn" in handedness research. I do know from medically qualified researchers with whom I have spoken that handedness (meaning, at the time, its direction) is of keen interest to them. Purely scientific questions are in my view of less widespread concern, though personally I do now have an interest in research such as recent evidence on when in evolutionary history, as illuminated by the fossil record, handedness first arose. Also I once pointed out in a biblio-metric analysis of the journal Laterality that animal sidedness has had considerable academic impact (in terms of citations). It was the old view, now thoroughly debunked, that predominantly right handedness was distinctively human and therefore of the more importance to human psychology. I may come back to you later and more directly with some personal responses to your presentation to the APS.

Standardization would be nice, but regardless, a valid measure should be used. I proposed the FLI in response to the 10-item EHI being used so heavily in neuroimaging research despite the poor psychometric properties of that inventory.

Thanks for your answer. I think we are in agreement, basically, except that you want to replace the Edinburgh whereas I think it can be revised to address the validity issue. Moving to a different inventory such as the FLI would raise problems of comparability of current with previous research.