Assessment and Diagnosis (cont'd)

Assessment Psychological Tests To provide useful information and assist in diagnosis, psychological tests must be standardized, have appropriate norms, and be reliable andvalid. Standardization - refers to whether there are uniform processes for administering and scoring the test. Ideally, everyone taking the test would do so under approximately the same conditions, and two people scoring the same test would score it using the same procedures. Norms - before a test can be used to obtain information about any individual, it must first be given to a large group of people similar to the people on whom the test will ultimately be used. The scores of this original group are recorded, and the scores of all subsequent people taking the test are compared to scores in the original group so that it is possible to know whether a score is high, low, or average. The data obtained from the original group of people taking the test constitute the norms for that test. Reliability - in order for a test to yield information, it must yield stable and consistent scores. For example, if a person took a test, and then retook it 5 minutes later, obtaining quite different scores, it would be impossible to know which score was accurate (testretest reliability). Similarly, if a person's responses on a test were evaluated by two different people, and the two scores were quite different, it would not be possible to know which score was more accurate (inter-rater reliability). If a test is not reliable, it cannot possibly be valid (see below). However, a test can be reliable without also being valid. Validity- the issue in validity is to determine whether a test is accurately measuring what it is designed to measure. There are several different ways to measure reliability.

Concurrent (descriptive) validity - refers to whether the test provides useful information about the current behavior of the person taking the test Predictive (criterion) validity - refers to whether the test accurately predicts the course of the disorder and provides useful information about the likely effect of treatment Face (content) validity - refers to whether the items on the test correspond to issues that professionals in the field consider relevant to the characteristics or disorders being measured Construct validity - refers to whether scores on the test correlate well with other measures of the same characteristics (as measured by scores on another test). Also refers to whether scores on the test are similar for people with similar disorders or characteristics and differ for people with different disorders or characteristics. This page was last updated on Tuesday June 10, 2008.