Psychology for Dummies (71 page)
Read Psychology for Dummies Online
Authors: Adam Cash
Tags: #Psychology, #General, #Body; Mind & Spirit, #Spirituality
Insight and judgment:
Does the patient understand that she may be mentally ill? Does he understand the relationship between his behaviors and mental processes and a psychological disturbance? Insight is important for assessing how motivated a patient is going to be and whether any treatment compliance issues may arise in the future. Addressing a patient’s judgment involves looking at the soundness of the decisions he or she makes and the degree of impulsivity and planning that goes on before action is taken. Judgment is especially important when assessing for dangerousness, violence potential, or suicide risk.
To each his own animalI once saw a middle-aged gentleman wearing a pair of famous mouse ears with a mouse nose, teeth, and whiskers in a coffee shop. Now, I know it’s a free country, but his appearance was unusual. Does this mean that he’s mentally ill? Who knows? But there aren’t a lot of middle-aged men who dress up like mice on a daily basis. When someone treats every day like Halloween, it’s worth asking about. No judging or jumping to conclusions — it’s just worth checking out.
These days, any number of different disciplines are involved in the treat- ment of mental illness and working with people with mental disorders. Psychological testing, however, is considered the sole domain of psychologists. Although some professionals such as school counselors and learning disability specialists conduct psychological testing, their testing is limited in scope and to a specific problem. Psychologists are thoroughly trained in all aspects of psychological testing and are considered the primary professionals in this area.
Psychological testing is part of the entire psychological assessment process.
Assessment
is a set of scientific procedures used to measure and evaluate an individual’s behavior and mental processes. Ann Anastasi defines a psychological test as an objective, standardized sample of behavior or mental processes. Tests are used to formalize data based on observations. Nearly all topics in psychology can be measured with a test.
Testing formats include surveys, pencil and paper tests, exercises and activities (like putting a puzzle together), interviews, and observation. Testing in psychology is not much different than testing in other fields. A blood test is a means of measuring an individual’s T-cell count, for example. A personality test is a means for measuring some specific aspect of a person’s personality. It’s the same idea, just a different subject matter.
What makes a test “objective?” A test is judged to be objective if it meets acceptable standards in three important areas: standardization, reliability, and validity.
Ann Anastasi considers a test properly
standardized
if there is a uniform procedure for administering and scoring it. Control of extraneous variables allows for maximum accuracy. If I give a test differently to two different people, then how will I be able to trust the results? I can’t. I have violated the principle of control in science.
Establishing a norm for a test is another step in standardization. A
norm
is a measure of the average performance for a large group of people on any given psychological test. For example, the average score on the
Wechsler Intelligence Test, Revised,
is 100. This average score establishes a norm or standard by which to compare people against each other. Norms are established by administering the test to a large group of people, or several groups, and measuring the average performance and range of performances, something called
variability.
A test that is not reliable is not a good test.
Reliability
is consistency. If I give the same person the same test on two or more occasions, will he get the same or comparable score? If the answer is yes, I’ve got reliability. A test should be found reliable before being put out on the market for use by professionals. I used to have a truck that had a totally unreliable gas gauge. I could put $10 of gas in it, and the needle would go up to half a tank. Other times, it would go up to three quarters of a tank. You may be thinking that I wasn’t smart enough to do this with an empty tank and with the same price gasoline, but this wasn’t like the Internet fiasco I discuss at the beginning of this chapter. I did it right. The gauge was bogus.
When it comes to psychological testing, I’ve often had patients object that a test was unreliable and that it didn’t prove or measure a darn thing. They may have had a point, but only if the test was unreliable.
How do I know that a test I am using is really measuring what it claims to measure? I may think that I’m measuring intelligence when I’m really measuring English language aptitude. This actually happens quite often when tests are improperly used with people whom the test has not been
normed
(establish its statistical properties with a large population of individuals similar to the people to whom it will be applied). Tests used with people who were not part of the group the test was normed on are highly suspect and most likely invalid.
When a test measures what it claims to measure, it’s considered
valid.
The validity of a test is established by using an outside measure of the psychological topic in question to compare the test with. If I have a test that claims to measure depression, I must compare my test findings with an already established measure of depression such as the
Beck Depression Inventory.
Keep in mind that many, if not the majority of, psychological tests measure things that are unobservable in the way other factors in other fields are. T-cells can be physically seen and therefore counted under a microscope. But can we see intelligence in the same manner? Not hardly. Intelligence is presumed to exist as it manifests itself in a measurable form on a psychological test. Therefore, the scientific basis on which psychological testing is formed is of utmost importance.
Psychological testing is a little more sophisticated than asking a few questions and counting up someone’s responses. It’s a scientific endeavor. Because of its complexity, most professionals argue that use of psychological tests should be controlled. Only qualified examiners should use the tests. The risk for potential over-simplification or misinterpretation is too high. If the tests were spread around indiscriminately, people would become too familiar with them, and they would lose their validity. Instead of measuring someone’s intelligence, for example, we may only be measuring his or her skill at remembering what was on the test the last time that he or she took it.
There are numerous types of psychological testing. Five common types of testing are clinical testing, educational/achievement testing, personality testing, intelligence testing, and neuropsychological testing.