Psychological Assessment I PDF

PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSESSMENT I Lesson I: Introduction Introduction to Psychological Assessment Psychological Psychological assessment - the gather...

PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSESSMENT I Lesson I: Introduction Introduction to Psychological Assessment Psychological Psychological assessment - the gathering and integration of psychology-related data for the purpose of making a Assessment vs. psychological evaluation that is accomplished using tools such as tests, interviews, case studies, behavioral Psychological Testing observation, and specially designed apparatuses and measurement procedures. It also answers a referral question. Psychological testing - the process of measuring psychology-related variables by means of devices or procedures designed to obtain a sample of behavior. The Tools of 1. The Test Psychological A test may be defined simply as a measuring device or procedure. Then what is a psychological test? Assessment psychological test refers to a device or procedure designed to measure variables related to psychology (such as intelligence, personality, aptitude, interests, attitudes, or values).  Format – form, plan, structure, arrangement, administration procedures, sand layout of test items. Also refers to the form in which test is administered; computerized, pencil-and-paper, or some other form.  Scoring - process of assigning such evaluative codes or statements to performance on tests, tasks, interviews, or other behavior samples. In the world of psychological assessment, many different types of scores exist.  Cut score (also referred to as a cutoff score or simply a cutoff)- is a reference point, usually numerical, derived by judgment and used to divide a set of data into two or more classifications. Some action will be taken, or some inference will be made based on these classifications. Tests differ widely in terms of their guidelines for scoring and interpretation. Some tests are self-scored by the test takers themselves, others are scored by computer, and others require scoring by trained examiners. Some tests, such as most tests of intelligence, come with test manuals that are explicit not only about scoring criteria but also about the nature of the interpretations that can be made from the scores. Other tests, such as the Rorschach Inkblot Test, are sold with no manual at all. The (presumably qualified) purchaser buys the stimulus materials and then selects and uses one of many available guides for administration, scoring, and interpretation.  Psychometric soundness – psychometrics: science of psychological measurement. One speaks of the psychometric soundness of a test when referring to how consistently and how accurately a psychological test measures what it purports to measure. utility refers to the usefulness or practical value P athat g ea test 1 |or5 other tool of assessment has for a particular purpose.  2. The Interview The word interview conjures images of face-to-face talk. But the interview as a tool of psychological assessment typically involves more than talk. If the interview is conducted face-to-face, then the interviewer is probably taking note of not only the content of what is said but also the way it is being said. More specifically, the interviewer is taking note of both verbal and nonverbal behavior. We can define an interview as a method of gathering information through direct communication involving reciprocal exchange. 3. The Portfolio As samples of one’s ability and accomplishment, a portfolio may be used as a tool of evaluation. Work products— whether retained on paper, canvas, film, video, audio, or some other medium—constitute what is called a portfolio.The appeal of portfolio assessment as a tool of evaluation extends to many other fields, including education. Some have argued, for example, that the best evaluation of a student’s writing skills can be accomplished not by the administration of a test, but by asking the student to compile a selection of writing samples. 4. Case History Data Refers to records, transcripts, and other accounts in written, pictorial, or other form that preserve archival information, official and informal accounts, and other data and items relevant to an assessee. 5. Behavioral Observation Monitoring the actions of others or oneself by visual or electronic means while recording quantitative and/or qualitative information regarding those actions. Who Are the Parties  The test developer- Test developers and publishers create tests or other methods of assessment. The Involved? American Psychological Association (APA) has estimated that more than 20,000 new psychological tests are developed each year. Among these new tests are some that were created for a specific research study, some that were created in the hope that they would be published, and some that represent refinements or modifications of existing tests. Test creators bring a wide array of backgrounds and interests to the test development process.  The test user - Psychological tests and assessment methodologies are used by a wide range of professionals, including clinicians, counselors, school psychologists, human resources personnel, consumer psychologists, experimental psychologists, and social psychologists.  The test taker – In the broad sense in which we are using the term “test taker,” anyone who is the subject of an assessment, or an evaluation can be a test taker or an assessee. As amazing as it sounds, this means that even a deceased individual can be considered an assessee.  Society at large - The societal need for “organizing” and “systematizing” has historically manifested itself in such varied questions as “Who is a witch?” “Who is schizophrenic?” and “Who is qualified?” The specific questions asked to have shifted with societal concerns. The methods used to determine the answers have varied throughout history as a function of factors such as intellectual sophistication and religious preoccupation. Application of  Educational settings- tests are administered early in school life to help identify children who may have Assessment special needs. In addition to school ability tests, another type of test commonly given in schools is an achievement test, which evaluates accomplishment or the degree of learning that has taken place.  Clinical settings - Tests and many other tools of assessment are widely used in clinical settings such as public, private, and military hospitals, inpatient and outpatient clinics, private-practice consulting rooms, schools, and other institutions. These tools are used to help screen for or diagnose behavior problems. The tests employed in clinical settings may be intelligence tests, personality tests, neuropsychological tests, or other specialized instruments, depending on the presenting or suspected problem area. The hallmark of testing in clinical settings is that the test or measurement technique is employed with only one individual at a time. Group testing is used primarily for screening—that is, identifying those individuals who require further diagnostic evaluation.  Business and military settings - A wide range of achievement, aptitude, interest, motivational, and other tests may be employed in the decision to hire as well as in related decisions regarding promotions, transfer, job satisfaction, and eligibility for further training. For a prospective air traffic controller, successful performance on a test of sustained attention to detail may be one requirement of employment. Page 2|5  For promotion to the rank of officer in the military, successful performance on a series of leadership tasks may be essential.  Governmental and organizational credentialing - Members of some professions have formed organizations with requirements for membership that go beyond those of licensing or certification. How Are Assessments  Responsible test users have obligations before, during, and after a test or any measurement procedure is Conducted? administered.  Before the test, ethical guidelines dictate that when test users have discretion about the tests administered, they should select and use only the test or tests that are most appropriate for the individual being tested. Before a test is administered, the test should be stored in a way that reasonably ensures that its specific contents will not be made known to the test taker in advance. Another obligation of the test user before the test’s administration is to ensure that a prepared and suitably trained person administers the test properly.  The test administrator (or examiner) must be familiar with the test materials and procedures and must have at the test site all the materials needed to properly administer the test. Materials needed might include a stopwatch, a supply of pencils, and enough test protocols. With reference to testing and assessment, protocol typically refers to the form or sheet or booklet on which a test taker’s responses are entered. The term may also be used to refer to a description of a set of test- or assessment-related procedures.  Test users have the responsibility of ensuring that the room in which the test will be conducted is suitable and conducive to the testing. To the extent possible, distracting conditions such as excessive noise, heat, cold, interruptions, glaring sunlight, crowding, inadequate ventilation, and so forth should be avoided.  During test administration, and especially in one-on-one or small-group testing, rapport (working relationship between the examiner and the examinee) between the examiner and the examinee can be critically important. It is crucial that attempts to establish rapport with the test taker not compromise any rules of the test administration instructions.  After a test administration, test users have many obligations as well. These obligations range from safeguarding the test protocols to conveying the test results in a clearly understandable fashion. If third parties were present during testing or if anything else that might be considered out of the ordinary happened during testing, it is the test user’s responsibility to make a note of such events on the report of the testing. Test users who have responsibility for interpreting scores or other test results have an obligation to do so in accordance with established procedures and ethical guidelines. A Historical Perspective It is believed that tests and testing programs first came into being in China as early as 2200 B.C.E. (DuBois, 1966, 1970). Testing was instituted as a means of selecting who, of many applicants, would obtain government jobs. In general, the tests examined proficiency in subjects like music, archery, horsemanship, writing, and arithmetic, as well as agriculture, geography, civil law, and military strategy. Knowledge of and skill in the rites and ceremonies of public and social life were also evaluated. Ancient Greco-Roman writings indicative of attempts to categorize people in terms of personality types. Such categorizations typically included reference to an overabundance or deficiency in some bodily fluid (such as blood or phlegm) as a factor believed to influence personality. During the Middle Ages, a question of critical importance was “Who is in league with the Devil?” and various measurement procedures were devised to address this question. It would not be until the Renaissance that psychological assessment in the modern sense began to emerge. By the eighteenth century, Christian von Wolff (1732, 1734) had anticipated psychology as a science and psychological measurement as a specialty within that science. Charles Dawrin (1859) - Darwin argued that chance variation in species would be selected or rejected by nature according to adaptivity and survival value. Indeed, Darwin’s writing on individual differences kindled interest in research on heredity by his half cousin, Francis Galton. Galton (1869) aspired to classify people “according to their natural gifts” and to ascertain their “deviation from an average”. Along the way, Galton would be credited with devising or contributing to the development of many contemporary tools of psychological assessment, including questionnaires, rating scales, and self-report inventories. Page 3|5 Galton pioneered the use of a statistical concept central to psychological experimentation and testing: the coefficient of correlation. Although Karl Pearson (1857–1936) developed the product-moment correlation technique, its roots can be traced directly to the work of Galton (Magnello & Spies, 1984). From heredity in peas, Galton’s interest turned to heredity in humans and various ways of measuring aspects of people and their abilities. At an exhibition in London in 1884, Galton displayed his Anthropometric Laboratory, where for a few pence you could be measured on variables such as height (standing), height (sitting), arm span, weight, breathing capacity, strength of pull, strength of squeeze, swiftness of blow, keenness of sight, memory of form, discrimination of color, and steadiness of hand. Through his own efforts and his urging of educational institutions to keep anthropometric records on their students, Galton excited widespread interest in the measurement of psychology-related variables. Assessment was also an important activity at the first experimental psychology laboratory, founded at the University of Leipzig in Germany by Wilhelm Max Wundt (1832–1920). In contrast to Galton, Wundt focused on how people were similar, not different. In fact, Wundt viewed individual differences as a frustrating source of error in experimentation, and he attempted to control all extraneous variables to reduce error to a minimum. Manuals for the administration of many tests provide explicit instructions designed to hold constant or “standardize” the conditions under which the test is administered. James McKeen Cattell (1860–1944) - Inspired by his interaction with Galton, Cattell returned to the University of Pennsylvania in 1888 and coined the term mental test in an 1890 publication. Other students of Wundt at Leipzig included Charles Spearman, Victor Henri, Emil Kraepelin, E. B. Titchener, G. Stanley Hall, and Lightner Witmer. Spearman is credited with originating the concept of test reliability as well as building the mathematical framework for the statistical technique of factor analysis. Victor Henri is the Frenchman who would collaborate with Alfred Binet on papers suggesting how mental tests could be used to measure higher mental processes (e.g., Binet & Henri, 1895a, 1895b, 1895c). Psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin was an early experimenter with the word association technique as a formal test (Kraepelin, 1892, 1895). Lightner Witmer received his Ph.D. from Leipzig and went on to succeed Cattell as director of the psychology laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania. Witmer has been cited as the “little-known founder of clinical psychology” (McReynolds, 1987), owing at least in part to his being challenged to treat a “chronic bad speller” in March of 1896 (Brotemarkle, 1947). Later that year Witmer founded the first psychological clinic in the United States at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1907 Witmer founded the journal Psychological Clinic. The first article in that journal was entitled “Clinical Psychology”. As early as 1895, Alfred Binet (1857–1911) and his colleague Victor Henri published several articles in which they argued for the measurement of abilities such as memory and social comprehension. Ten years later, Binet and collaborator Theodore Simon published a 30-item “measuring scale of intelligence” designed to help identify Paris schoolchildren with intellectual disability. The Binet test would subsequently go through many revisions and translations—and, in the process, launch both the intelligence testing movement and the clinical testing movement. In 1939 David Wechsler - introduced a test designed to measure adult intelligence. For Wechsler, intelligence was “the aggregate or global capacity of the individual to act purposefully, to think rationally, and to deal effectively with his environment”. Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) or the WAIS has been revised several times since then, and versions of Wechsler’s test have been published that extend the age range of testtakers from early childhood through senior adulthood. Group intelligence tests (of Binet) came into being in the United States in response to the military’s need for an efficient method of screening the intellectual ability of World War I recruits. This same need again became urgent as the United States prepared for entry into World War II. Psychologists would again be called upon by the government service to develop group tests, administer them to recruits, and interpret the test data. Psychologist Robert S. Woodworth was assigned the task of developing a measure of adjustment and emotional stability that could be administered quickly and efficiently to groups of recruits. The committee developed several experimental versions of what were, in essence, paper-and-pencil psychiatric interviews. To disguise the true purpose of one such test, the questionnaire was labeled as a “Personal Data Sheet.” Draftees and volunteers were asked to indicate yes or no to a series of questions that probed for the existence of various kinds of psychopathology. For example, one of the test questions was “Are you troubled with the idea that people are watching you on the street?”. This instrument was the first widely used self-report measure of personality. In general, self-report refers to a process whereby assessees themselves supply assessment-related information by responding to questions, keeping a diary, or self-monitoring thoughts or behaviors. Page 4|5  Various methods were developed to provide measures of personality that did not rely on self-report. One such method or approach to personality assessment came to be described as projective in nature. A projective test is one in which an individual is assumed to “project” onto some ambiguous stimulus his or her own unique needs, fears, hopes, and motivation. The ambiguous stimulus might be an inkblot, a drawing, a photograph, or something else. Perhaps the best known of all projective tests is the Rorschach, a series of inkblots developed by the Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach. The use of pictures as projective stimuli was popularized in the late 1930s by Henry A. Murray, Christiana D. Morgan, and their colleagues at the Harvard Psychological Clinic. Reference: Cohen, R. J. (2018). Psychological testing and assessment (9th Edition). McGraw-Hill Education. Page 5|5