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Intelligence tests, personality tests, behavioural assessments, and clinical interviews all yield potentially important information about the person being tested, but none .of these techniques provides an overall assessment of the examinee's level of functioning. In other words, no individual test provides a complete picture of the individual; it provides only a specific piece of information about that person. One major task of psychologists involved in assessment is to evaluate information provided by many tests, interviews, and observations, and to combine this 5
UNIT 1 INTRODUCTION TO
PSYCHODIAGNOSTICS,
DEFINITION, CONCEPT AND
DESCRIPTION
Structure
1.0 Introduction
1.1 Objectives
1.2 Psychodiagnostics
1.3 Testing, Assessment and Clinical Practice
1.4 Variables Domains of Psychological Assessment 1.4.1 Performance Variables 1.4.2 Personality Variables
1.5 Data Sources for Psychological Assessment 1.5.1 (^) Actuarial and Biographical Data 1.5.2 (^) Behavioural Trace 1.5.3 (^) Behavioural Observation 1.5.4 (^) Behaviour Ratings 1.5.5 (^) Expressive Behaviour 1.5.6 (^) Projective Technique 1.5.7 (^) Questionnaires 1.5.8 (^) Objective Test 1.5.9 (^) Psycho Physiological Data
1.6 Practical Applications 1.6.1 Assessment of Intelligence and Other Aptitude Functions 1.6.2 Psychological Assessment in Clinical Context 1.6.3 Assessment in Vocational Guidance Testing and Job Selection / Placement
1.7 Let Us Sum Up
1.8 Unit End Questions
1.9 Suggested Readings
1.0 INTRODUCTION
Psycbo<Uagnostics
information to make complex and important judgments about individuals. For example, when an individual shows evidence of difficultyin adjusting to the demands of daily life, a clinician must decide whether therapy would be helpful and, if so, what type of therapy would be most appropriate.
Psychologists also are called on to assess individuals in a variety of non clinical settings. For example, school psychologists might consider information about a child's intellectual performance, social, skills, and home environment in recommending placement in special education program Industrial psychologists might be asked to evaluate management trainees who participate in a series of assessment exercises. In each case, it is assumed that the assessment is more than a simple combination of test scores - it is a judgment on the part of a trained professional.
Although expert judgment plays a part in each form of psychological measurement, the practice of clinicaJ assessment and the implementation of structured assessment programs both broadly defmed as the integration of multiple pieces of information into an overall evaluation of the present state of the individual being assessed, is somewhat unique in that human judgment is an integral component of the process. In this unit we are studying all about assessment in psycho diagnostics. We start with introducing what is psycho diagnostics and follow up by testing, assessment and clinical practice. Then we deal with variable domains of psychological assessment within which we discuss performance and personality variables. Then we present the data sources for psychological assessment and then 'deal with practical application of assessment.
1.1 OBJECTIVES
After completing this unit, you will be able to:
- Explain the definition and concept of Psychodiagnostics;
- Discuss the various domains of psychological assessment;
..• Explain the ten data sources for psychological assessment; and
- Describe the practical applications of psycho diagnostic assessment.
1.2 PSYCHODIAGNOSTICS
Korchin and Schuldberg (1981) define psychodiagnosis as a process that :/
a) uses a number of procedures,
b) intended to tap various areas of psychological functions,
c) both at a conscious and unconscious level,
d) using projective techniques as well as more objective and standardized tests,
e) in both cases, interpretation may rest on syinbolic signs as well as scoreable responses,
f) with the goal of describing individuals in personological rather than normative terms. (p. 1147)
1.4 VARIABLE DOMAINS OF PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSESSMENT
Psychodiagnostics
Personality tests, and
Neurological tests.
The Wechsler Intelligence Scales (WISC-I11 and WAIS-III) and the Stanford- Binet represent the most popular tests of general mental ability. These tests serve a dual function in forming assessments of individuals. First, an evaluation of general mental ability often is crucial for understanding an individual's behaviour, since many behavioural problems are linked to intellectual deficits. Second, individual intelligence tests present an opportunity to observe the examinee's behaviour in response to several intellectually demanding tasks, and thus they provide data regarding the subject's persistence, maturity, problem-solving styles, and other characteristics.
The Rorschach, the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) represent three of the most popular personality tests. Of the three, the MMPI is most closely associated with the diagnosis of psychopathology, whereas the TAT is most closely associated with the assessment of motives and drives. The Rorschach may be used for a variety of purposes, ranging from the assessment of specific personality traits to the diagnosis of perceptual disorders, depending on the scoring system used.
The Bender-Gestalt and the Luria-Nebraska Neuropsychological Test Battery are widely used in the diagnosis of neurological disorders. The Bender-Gestalt is used in the assessment of perceptual disorders and organic dysfunctions, although it may be used for a wide range of diagnostic purposes, whereas the Luria Nebraska Battery provides a wide ranging assessment of perceptual, motor, and intellectual functions that might be affected by damage to specific portions of the brain.
Psycho diagnostic assessment methods have been developed for a wide spectrum of trait and state variables affecting human behaviour. Following a proposal by Cronbach (1949), one distinguishes between performance and personality measures, the former referring to measures of maximum behaviour a person can maintain the latter to measures of typical style of behaviour. Intelligence tests are examples of performance measures, a test of extraversion introversion or of trait anxiety examples of personality measures. While handy for descriptive purposes, this distinction must not be mistaken for a theoretical one, as trait measures of performance may in fact correlate with trait measures of personality (for example, speed of learning with level of trait anxiety).
Within the limits of this distinction, the following summary list help to illustrate the scope of behavioural variables for which assessment procedures have been developed.
1.4.1 Performance Variables
These include measures of sensory processes (for example: tactile sensitivity, visual acuity, color vision proficiency, auditory intensity threshold); perceptual aptitudes (tactile texture differentiation, visual closure, visual or auditory pattern recognition, memory for faces, visuo spatial tasks, etc.). Measures of attention
and concentration (tonic and phasic alertness; span of attention, distractibility, double performance tasks, vigilance performance over time), psychomotor aptitudes (including a wide variety of speed of reaction task designs), measures oflearning and memory (short term vs. long term memory, memory span, intentional vs. incidental memory, visual/auditory / kinesthetic memory), assessment of cognitive performance and intelligence (next to general intelligence a wide range of primary mental abilities like verbal comprehension, word fluency, numerical ability, reasoning abilities, measures of different aspects of creativity, of social or emotional intelligence; assessment of language proficiency (developmental linguistic performance, aphasia test systems, etc.); measures of social competence.
Psychodiagnostics, Definition, Concept and Description
1.4.2 Personality Variables
These include the assessment of primary factors of personality (especially of the so called Big Five and numerous more specific personality measurement scales); special clinical schedules and symptom checklists (to assess anxiety, symptoms of depression, schizotypic tendency, personality disorders, etc.); motivation structures and interests; styles of daily living; pastime and life goals; assessment of incisive life events; assessment of stress tolerance and stress coping (including coping with serious illnesses and ailments); plus a wide range of still more specific assessment variables, like measures for the assessment of specific motives or specific styles of coping with illness or stressful life events.
By now even the number of Psycho diagnostic assessment methods meeting high .psychometric standards must have already reached many tens of thousands, rendering it totally impossible to give more than an informative overview within the limitations of this unit. Rather than enumerating hundreds of assessment procedures we shall here take a systematic look at major data sources for psychological assessment and then briefly examine a few selected psycho diagnostic assessment problems and how they would be typically approached.
- Define psycho diagnostics and describe its features.
Self Assessment Questions
Elucidate testing, assessment and clinical practice.
What are the two variable domains of psychological assessment?
In the 1930s and 1940s many clinical psychologists, often influenced by psychoanalysis and other forms of depth psychology, placed high expectations in projective techniques, believing that they would induce a person to express her/ his perception of the ambiguous stimulus material, thus willingly or even unwillingly 'uncovering' her/his personal individuality, including motives and emotions that the person may not even be aware of. Later, in thel950s and 1960s, research has dearly shown that such assessment, methods not only tend to lack in scoring -.objectivity and psychometric reliability, but, and still more important, also turned out to be of very limited validity, if any.
Nevertheless projective tests still keep some of their appeal today, and research in the1960s and thereafter succeeded in improving techniques like the Rorschach 11
administering questionnaires and objective tests, starting in the 1920s and 1930s,has pushed careful, systematic behaviour observation to the side of the assessment process. Only in recent years, especially within clinical assessment and treatment contexts following behavior therapeutic approaches, is the potential value of behaviour ratings for the assessment process being re discovered.
Psychodiagnostics, Definition, Concept and Description
1.5.4 Behaviour Ratings
In behaviour rating assessments a person is asked to evaluate her / his own behaviour or the behaviour of another person with respect to given characteristics, judgmental scales, or checklist items. The method can be applied to concurrent behaviour under direct observation (as in modem assessment center applications) or, and more typically, to the rater's explicit or anecdotal memory of the ratee's behaviour at previous occasions, in (pastor imagined) concrete situations, or in a general sense. Behaviour rating methods may tell more about the meutal representations that raters hold (developed, believe in) regarding the assessed person's behaviour than about that behaviour itself.
Behaviour ratings constitute an essential methodology in clinical and industrial / organisational psychology, in psychotherapy research and, last but not the least, in basic personality research. Modem text books of personality research usually give detailed accounts of how to devise behaviour rating scales and how to compensate for common sources of error variance in ratings.
1.5.5 Expressive Behaviour
As a technical term, expressive behaviour refers to variations in the way in which a person may look, move, talk, express her / his current state of emotion, feelings or motives. Making a grim-looking face, trembling, getting a red face, sweating on the forehead, walking in a hesitant way, speaking loudly or with an anxiously soft voice, would be examples of variations in expression behaviour.
Thereby expression refers to stylistic attributes in a person's behaviour which will induce an observer to draw explicitly or implicitly inferences about that person's state of mind, emotional tension, feeling state, or the like. Assessing another person from her / his expressive behaviour has a long tradition which goes back to pre scientific days. More recently this approach has been extended to the study of gross bodily movement expression (Feldman & Rime, 1991). This research is relevant also for developing teaching aids in psychological assessment and observer training.
1.5.6 Projective Technique
1.5.7 Questionnaires
Psychodiagnostics
test at least as far as scoring objectivity and reliability are concerned. Further more thematic associationtechniques like the TATmaintain their status as assessment methods potentially useful for deducing assessment hypotheses. In addition, special TAT forms have been devised for assessing specific motivation variables such as achievement motivation(McClelland, 1971). In the clinical context, once their prime field of application, projective techniques are no longer considered a tenable basis for hypothesis testing and theory development, let alone therapy planning and evaluation.
Most psychodiagnostic assessments will include an interview at least as an ancillary component and be it only for establishing personal contact and an atmosphere of trust. Extensive research on interview structure, interviewer influences, and interviewee response biases has given rise to a spectrum of interview techniques for different purposes and assessment contexts. As a rule, clinical assessments will start out with an exploratory interview in which the psychologist will seek to focus .the problem at hand and collect information for deriving assessment hypotheses. An interview is called unstructured if questions asked by the psychologist do not follow a predetermined course and, largely if not exclusively, depends on the person's responses and own interjections, Today most assessment interviews are semi structured or fully structured. In the first case, the interviewer is guided by a schedule of questions or topics, with varying degrees of freedom as to how the psychologist may choose to follow up on the person's responses. Fully structured interviews follow an interview schedule containing all questions to be asked, often with detailed rules about which question(s)to ask next depending on a person's response to previous questions. An example of such a structured clinical interview schedule is the Structured Clinical Interview (SCID; Spitzer, Williams, & Gibbon,
- for clinical assessments according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM)..
Originally,personality inventories, interest surveys, and attitude or opinion schedules were devised as structured interviews in written, following a multiple choice response format (rather than presenting questions open ended as in an interview proper). In a typical questionnaire each item (question or statement) will be followed by two or three response alternatives such as 'Yes, do not know, No' or 'True, Cannot Say: Untrue'.
Early clinical personality questionnaires like the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) drew much of their item content from confirmed clinical symptoms and syndromes. By contrast, personality questionnaires designed to measure extraversion, introversion, neuroticism, and other personality factors in healthy normal persons rely on item contents from empirical (mostly factor analytic) studies of these primary factors of personality. As in behaviour ratings, research identified a number of typical response sets also in questionnaire data, including acquiescence (readiness to choose the affirmative response alternative, regardless of content) and social desirability (preference for the socially more acceptable response alternative). One way to cope with these sources of deficient response objectivity was to introduce special validity scales (as early as the MMPI) to control for response sets in a person's protocol. Yet individual differences in response sets may and in fact do relate also to valid personality variance themselves. 12
Self Assessment Questions
- In the data sources of psychological assessment, describe actuarial and .biographical data.
Psycho<tiagnostics
and perhaps even more directly so, through monitoring psycho physiological system parameters that relate to the kind of behaviour variations that an assessment is targeted at. These psycho physiological variables include measures of brain activity and brain function plasticity (electroencephalogram, EEG; functional magnetic resonance imaging, fMRI; magnetoencephalogram, MEG), of hormone and immune system parameters and response pattern, and of peripheral psycho physiological responses mediated through the autonomic nervous system (cardiovascular system response patterns: electrocardiogram, ECG; breathing parameters: pneumogram; variations in sweat gland activity: electro dermal activity, EDA; in muscle tonus: electro myogram, EMG; or in eye movements and in pupil diameter: pupillometry). Standard psychophysiology textbooks (Caccioppo & Tassinary, 1990) introduce basic concepts and measurement operations. Modem computer assisted recording and analysis of psycho physiological data facilitate on line monitoring, often concurrent with presentation of objective tests, in an interview situation or even, by means of portable recording equipment, in a person's habitual daily life course (ambulatory psychophysiology).
Explain behavioural trace and behavioural observation.
Describe behaviour ratings.
What is expressive behaviour?
Describe projective techniques.
a) Verbal IQ, 15
Elucidate objective tests and questionnaires. Psychodiagnostics, Defmition, Concept and Description
What is involved in psycho physiological data?
1.6 PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS
In this section, you will be introduced to some frequently used methods of psychological assessment for three frequently encountered assessment problems: testing of intellective and other aptitude functions; psychological assessment in clinical contexts; and vocational guidance testing.
1.6.1 Assessment of Intelligence and Other Aptitude Functions
Clearly this is the primary domain of objective behaviour tests. The tests of cognitive and other aptitudes were among the first methods of assessment ever to be developed. Following up on the scaling proposal of mental age (age equivalence, in months, of the number of test items solved correctly) as suggested by Binet and Henri (1896) in their prototype scale of intellectual development in early childhood, the German psychologist William Stem suggested an intelligence quotient (IQ), defined as the ratio of mental age over biological age, as a measurement concept for assessing a gross function like intelligence in a score that would be independent of the age of the person tested. When subsequent research revealed psychometric inadequacies with this formula, the US psychologist David Wechsler proposed in his test (Wechsler, 1958) an IQ computed as age standardized normalized standard score (with mean of 100 and standard deviation of 15). Now available in re designed and re standardized form as Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS), Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC) and Wechsler Pre-School Test of Intelligence, this test package has become the trend setting intelligence test system of widest application, also internationally through numerous foreign language adaptations. So a closer look at its assessment structure seems in order.
The WAIS, for example, contains ten individually administered tests of two kinds:
i) verbaltests (general information, general comprehension, digit memory span, arithmetic reasoning, fmding similarities of concepts) and
ii) five performance tests (digit symbol substitution, arranging pictures according to the sequence of a story, completing pictures, mosaic test block design, object assembly of two dimensional puzzle pictures). A person's test performance is assessed in three IQ scores, viz.,
1.6.3 Assessment in Vocational Guidance Testing and Job SelectionIPlacement
Ever since the 1920s a multitude of tests of varying conceptual band width have been developed to assess specific aptitudes and interest variables related to different vocational training curricula and on the job work demands. In vocational guidance testing, integrated multi dimensional systems like one inaugurated by Paul Host in the 1950s for the US State of Washington have since become a model of approach in many countries. For example, the German Bundesanstalt fursrbeit (Federal Office of Labor) developed its own multi dimensional testing and prognosis system for vocational guidance counseling at senior high school level. A similar, CAT formatted multi dimensional test system has been developed by the German Armed Forces Psychological Service Unit. Comparable assessment systems for guidance and placement have been devised, for example, in the UK and the US. Compared to these broad band assessment systems, job selection / placement testing in industrial and organizational psychology typically is narrower in scope, though more demanding in specific functions and job related qualifications.
Psychodiagnostics, Definition, Concept and Description
Before implementing such an assessment system, a careful analysis of the job structure, the nature of professional demands and of contextual situational factors is absolutely compulsory. The literature offers a developed instrumentalism for carrying out such analyses (Kleinbeck & Rutenfranz, 1987). Since the1970s / 1980s a new methodology called 'assessment center' has been introduced to provide for behaviour observation, behaviour rating, and interview assessment data in selected social situations devised to mirror salient demand situations inl future on the job performance (Lattmann,1989). In continental Europe the assessment center approach has even become something like the method of choice, in selecting, for example, persons for higher level managerial positions. Moreover, single stage assessment and testing is now being replaced by on the. job personnel development programs and special trainings offered to devise a more intervention oriented, multi stage approach to assessment in organisational development. In·CAT formatted assessment programs for industrial / organisational selection and placement applications, also special simulation techniques (for example, in testing for interpersonal cooperation under stress conditions) are currently under development.
Self Assessment Questions
Discuss practical application of psychological assessment.
Describe assessment of intelligence and other aptitude functions.
Elucidate psychological assessment in clinical context. Psychodiagnostics
Discuss assessment in vocational guidance testing and job selection and placement.
1.7 LET US SUM UP
As a technical term, 'psycho diagnosis' refers to methods developed to describe, record, and interpret a person's behaviour, be it with respect to underlying basic dispositions (traits),to characteristics of state or change, or to such external criteria as expected success in a given training curriculum or in psychotherapeutic treatment. Methods of psychological assessment and testing constitute a major technology that grew out of psychological research, with widespread impact in educational, clinical, and industrial/organisational psychology, in counseling and, last but not least, in research itself.
In the most general sense, all assessment methods share one common feature: they are designed so as to capture the enormous variability (between persons, or within a single person) in kind and properties of behaviour and to relate these observed variations to explanatory dimensions or to external criteria of psychological intervention and prediction. As a distinct field of psychology, psychological assessment comprises (1) a wide range of instruments for observing, recording, and analysing behavioural variations; (2) formalised theories of psychological measurement underlying the design of these methods; and, fmally, (3) systematic methods of psycho diagnostic inference in interpreting assessment results. In this unit all three branches of psychological assessment have been covered and major methods of assessment have been reviewed.
Assessment methods differ in the approach taken to study behavioral variations: through direct observation, by employing self ratings or ratings supplied from contact persons, by applying systematic behaviour sampling techniques (so called 'tests') or through studying psycho physiological correlates of behaviour. In this unit these alternative approaches are dealt with as different data sources for assessment.
1.8 UNIT END QUESTIONS
Discuss the concept and definition of psychodiagnostics?
Mention some of the most widely used tests in clinical practice?
Describe the variable-domains of psychological assessment?
