CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGY

PERSONALITY ASSESSMENT

OBJECTIVE TEST

Objective personality measures involve the administration of a standard set of questions or statements to which the examinee responds using a fixed set of options

Advantages:

-Economical

-Scoring and administration are relatively simple and objective

-Apparent objectivity and reliability

Disadvantages

The items of many inventories are often behavioral in nature. That is, the questions or statements concern behaviors that may (or may not) characterize the respondent.

Disadvantages

Other difficulties involve the transparent meaning of some inventories’ questions, which can obviously facilitate faking on the part of some patients. Some tests tend to depend heavily on the patient’s self-knowledge.

The forced-choice approach

Methods of Constructionfor Objective Tests

1. Content Validation. Clinicians to decide what it is they wish to assess and then to

simply ask the patient for that information.

Do you sleep well at night?” “Do you get angry easily? “Are you easily insulted?”

(a) carefully defining all relevant aspects of the variable you are attempting to measure;

(b) consulting experts before generating items; (c) using judges to assess each potential item’s relevance to

the variable of interest; and (d) using psychometric analyses to evaluate each item before

you include it in your measure

However, Wiggins in 1973, observes, several potential problems are inherent in the content validity approach to test construction.

1. First, can clinicians assume that every patient interprets a given item in exactly the same way?

2. Can patients accurately report their own behavior or emotions?

3. Will patients be honest, or will they attempt to place themselves in a good light (or even a bad light at times)?

4. Can clinicians assume that the “experts” can be counted on to define the essence of the concept they are trying to measure?

2. Empirical Keying An approach to test development that

emphasizes the selection of items that discriminate between normal individuals and members of different diagnostic groups, regardless of whether the items appear theoretically relevant to the diagnoses of interest

3. Factor Analysis

Factor analytic approach A statistical method often used in test construction to determine whether potential items are or are not highly related to each other

4. Construct Validity Approach.

An approach to test construction in which scales are developed based on a specific theory, refined using factor analysis and other procedures, and validated by showing (through empirical study) that individuals who achieve certain scores behave in ways that could be predicted by their scores.

Projective Test

Psychological testing techniques that use people’s responses to ambiguous test stimuli to make judgments about their adjustment–maladjustment.

Proponents believe that examinees “project” themselves onto the stimuli, thus revealing unconscious aspects of themselves

Projective Tests

Sir Francis Galton (1879) suggested word-association methods, and Kraepelin made use of them. Binet

Henri (1896) experimented with pictures as projective devices. Alfred Adler asked patients to recall their first memory, which is also a kind of projective approach.

However, the real impetus for projective techniques can be traced to Hermann Rorschach’s classic 1921 monograph, in which he described the use if inkblots as a method for the differential diagnosis of psychopathology

In 1935, Morgan and Murray introduced the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), and in 1938,

Characteristics of the Projective Techniques

1. In response to an unstructured or ambiguous stimulus, examinees are forced to impose their own structure and, in so doing, reveal something of themselves (such as needs, wishes, or conflicts).

2. The stimulus material is unstructured. This is a very tenuous criterion, even though it is widely assumed to reflect the essence of projective techniques.

For example, if 70% of all examinees perceive Card V on the Rorschach as a bat, then we can hardly say that the stimulus is unstructured.

3. The method is indirect.

4. There is freedom of response.

5. Response interpretation deals with more variables. Since the range of possible responses is so broad, the clinician can make interpretations along multiple dimensions (needs, adjustment, diagnostic category, ego defenses, and so on).

Many objective tests, in contrast, provide but a single score (such as degree of psychological distress) or scores on a fixed number of dimensions or scales.

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