Handbook of Psychological Assessment

Gerald Goldstein, Michel Hersen

• Publisher: Pergamon
• Year: 2000
• eBook ISBN: 9780080540023
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Clinical Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The field of psychological assessment has been undergoing rapid change. The second edition of this Handbook, published in 1990, appeared at the beginning of a decade marked by extensive advances in assessment in essentially all of its specialized areas. There are many new tests, new applications of established tests, and new test systems. Major revisions have appeared of established tests, notably the Wechsler intelligence scales. The time seemed right for a third edition, since even over the relatively brief period of ten years, many tests described in the second edition have been replaced, and are no longer commonly used. Furthermore, much new research in such areas as neuropsychology, cognitive science, and psychopathology have made major impacts on how many tests and other assessment procedures are used and interpreted. This third edition represents an effort to give the reader an overview of the many new developments in assessment, while still maintaining material on basic psychometric concepts in order for it to continue to serve as a comprehensive handbook for the student and professional.

Part I

Introduction

Chapter 1

Historical Perspectives

Gerald Goldstein; Michel Hersen

INTRODUCTION

“A test is a systematic procedure for comparing the behavior of two or more persons.” This definition of a test, offered by Lee Cronbach many years ago (1949/1960) probably still epitomizes the major content of psychological assessment. The invention of psychological tests, then known as mental tests, is generally attributed to Galton (Boring, 1950) and occurred during the middle and late 19th century. Galton’s work was largely concerned with differences between individuals, and his approach was essentially in opposition to the approaches of other psychologists of his time. Most psychologists then were primarily concerned with the exhaustive study of mental phenomena in a few participants, while Galton was more interested in somewhat less specific analyses of large numbers of people. Perhaps the first psychological test was the “Galton whistle,” which evaluated high tone hearing. Galton also appeared to have believed in the statistical concept that held that errors of measurement in individuals could be cancelled out through the mass effect of large samples.

Obviously, psychologists have come a long way from the simple tests of Galton, Binet, and Munsterberg, and the technology of testing is now in the computer age, with almost science-fiction-like extensions, such as testing by satellite. Psychometrics is now an advanced branch of mathematical and statistical science, and the administration, scoring, and even interpretation of tests have become increasingly objectified and automated. While some greet the news with dread and others with enthusiasm, we may be rapidly approaching the day when most of all testing will be administered, scored, and interpreted by computer. Thus, the 19th-century image of the school teacher administering paper- and-pencil tests to the students in her classroom and grading them at home has changed to the extensive use of automated procedures administered to huge portions of the population by representatives of giant corporations. Testing appears to have become a part of western culture, and there are indeed very few people who enter educational, work, or clinical settings who do not take many tests during their lifetimes.

In recent years, there appears to have been a distinction made between testing and assessment, assessment being the broader concept. Psychologists do not just give tests now; they perform assessments. The title of this volume, the Handbook of Psychological Assessment, was chosen advisedly and is meant to convey the view that it is not simply a handbook of psychological testing, although testing will be covered in great detail. The term assessment implies that there are many ways of evaluating individual differences. Testing is one way, but there are also interviewing, observations of behavior in natural or structured settings, and recording of various physiological functions. Certain forms of interviewing and systematic observation of behavior are now known as behavioral assessments, as opposed to the psychometric assessment accomplished through the use of formal tests. Historically, interest in these two forms of assessment has waxed and waned, and in what follows we will briefly try to trace these trends in various areas.

INTELLIGENCE TESTING

The testing of intelligence in school children was probably the first major occupation of clinical psychology. The Binet scales and their descendants continue to be used, along with the IQ concept associated with them. Later, primarily through the work of David Wechsler and associates (Wechsler, 1944), intelligence testing was extended to adults and the IQ concept was changed from the mental age system (Mental Age/Chronological Age × 100) to the notion of a deviation IQ based on established norms. While Wechsler was primarily concerned with the individual assessment of intelligence, many group-administered paper-and-pencil tests also emerged during the early years of the 20th century. Perhaps the old Army Alpha and Beta tests, developed for intellectual screening of inductees into the armed forces during the first world war, were the first examples of these instruments. Use of these tests progressed in parallel with developments in more theoretical research regarding the nature of intelligence. The English investigators Burt, Pearson, and Spearman and the Americans Thurstone and Guilford are widely known for their work in this area, particularly with factor analysis. The debate over whether intelligence is a general ability (g) or a series of specific abilities represents one of the classic controversies in psychology. A related controversy that is still very much with us (Jensen, 1983) has to do with whether intelligence is primarily inherited or acquired and with the corollary issue having to do with ethnic differences in intellectual ability.

Another highly significant aspect of intelligence testing has to do with its clinical utilization. The IQ now essentially defines the borders of mental retardation, and intelligence tests are extremely widely used to identify retarded children in educational settings (American Psychiatric Association [APA], Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders, 4th ed. (DSM-IV, 1994). However, intelligence testing has gone far beyond the attempt to identify mentally retarded individuals and has become widely applied in the fields of psychopathology and neuropsychology. With regard to psychopathology, under the original impetus of David Rapaport and collaborators (Rapaport, 1945), the Wechsler scales became clinical instruments used in conjunction with other tests to evaluate patients with such conditions as schizophrenia and various stress-related disorders. In the field of neuropsychology, use of intelligence testing is perhaps best described by McFie’s (1975) remark, “It is perhaps a matter of luck that many of the Wechsler subtests are neurologically relevant” (p. 14). In these applications, the intelligence test was basically used as an instrument with which the clinician could examine various cognitive processes, on the basis of which inferences could be made about the patient’s clinical status.

In summary, the intelligence test has become a widely used assessment instrument in educational, industrial, military, and clinical settings. While in some applications the emphasis remains on the simple obtaining of a numerical IQ value, it would probably be fair to say that many, if not most, psychologists now use the intelligence test as a means of examining the individual’s cognitive processes; of seeing how he or she goes about solving problems; of identifying those factors that may be interfering with adaptive thinking; of looking at various language and nonverbal abilities in brain-damaged patients; and of identifying patterns of abnormal thought processes seen in schizophrenic and autistic patients. Performance profiles and qualitative characteristics of individual responses to items appear to have become the major foci of interest, rather than the single IQ score. The recent appearance of the new Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS-III) (Wechsler, 1997) reflects the major impacts cognitive psychology and neuropsychology have had on the way in which intelligence is currently conceptualized.

PERSONALITY ASSESSMENT

Personality assessment has come to rival intelligence testing as a task performed by psychologists. However, while most psychologists would agree that an intelligence test is generally the best way to measure intelligence, no such consensus exists for personality evaluation. In long-term perspective, it would appear that two major philosophies and perhaps three assessment method’s have emerged. The two philosophies can be traced back to Allport’s (1937) distinction between nomothetic versus idiographic methodologies and Meehl’s (1954) distinction between clinical and statistical or actuarial prediction. In essence, some psychologists feel that personality assessments are best accomplished when they are highly individualized, while others have a preference for quantitative procedures based on group norms. The phrase “seer versus sign” has been used to epitomize this dispute. The three methods referred to are the interview, and projective and objective tests. Obviously, the first way psychologists and their predecessors found out about people was to talk to them, giving the interview historical precedence. But following a period when the use of the interview was eschewed by many psychologists, it has made a return. It would appear that the field is in a historical spiral, with various methods leaving and returning at different levels.

The interview began as a relatively unstructured conversation with the patient and perhaps an informant, with varying goals, including obtaining a history, assessing personality structure and dynamics, establishing a diagnosis, and many other matters. Numerous publications have been written about interviewing (e.g., Menninger, 1952), but in general they provided outlines and general guidelines as to what should be accomplished by the interview. However, model interviews were not provided. With or without this guidance, the interview was viewed by many as a subjective, unreliable procedure that could not be sufficiently validated. For example, the unreliability of psychiatric diagnosis based on studies of multiple interviewers had been well established (Zubin, 1967). More recently, however, several structured psychiatric interviews have appeared in which the specific content, if not specific items, has been presented, and for which very adequate reliability has been established. There are by now several such interviews available including the Schedule for Affective Disorders and Schizophrenia (SADS) (Spitzer & Endicott, 1977), the Renard Diagnostic Interview (Helzer, Robins, Croughan, & Weiner, 1981), and the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-III, DSM-III-R, or DSM-IV (SCID or SCID-R) (Spitzer & Williams, 1983) (now updated for DSM-IV). These interviews have been established in conjunction with objective diagnostic criteria including DSM-III itself, the Research Diagnostic Criteria (Spitzer, Endicott, & Robins, 1977), and the Feighner Criteria (Feighner, et al., 1972). These new procedures have apparently ushered in a “comeback” of the interview, and many psychiatrists and psychologists now prefer to use these procedures rather than either the objective- or projective-type psychological test.

Those advocating use of structured interviews point to the fact that in psychiatry, at least, tests must ultimately be validated against judgments made by psychiatrists. These judgments are generally based on interviews and observation, since there really are no biological or other objective markers of most forms of psychopathology. If that is indeed the case, there seems little point in administering elaborate and often lengthy tests when one can just as well use the criterion measure itself, the interview, rather than the test. There is no way that a test can be more valid than an interview if an interview is the validating criterion. Structured interviews have made a m...

Table of contents

• Cover image
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright page
• Preface
• Part I: Introduction
• Part II: Psychometric Foundations
• Part III: Assessment of Intelligence
• Part IV: Achievement, Aptitude, and Interest
• Part V: Neuropsychological Assessment
• Part VI: Interviewing
• Part VII: Personality Assessment
• Part VIII: Behavioral Assessment
• Part IX: Special Topics and Applications
• Author Index
• Subject Index
• About the Editors and Contributors