Handbook of Psychological Assessment

Gerald Goldstein,Daniel N. Allen,John Deluca

• Editorial: Academic Press
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780128025147
• Edición: 4
• Categoría: Psychology
• Categoría: Personality in Psychology

The fourth edition of the Handbook of Psychological Assessment, provides scholarly overviews of the major areas of psychological assessment, including test development, psychometrics, technology of testing, and commonly used assessment measures. Psychological assessment is included for all ages, with new coverage encompassing ethnic minorities and the elderly. Assessment methodology discussed includes formal testing, interviewing, and observation of behavior. The handbook also discusses assessment of personality and behavior, including intelligence, aptitude, interest, achievement, personality and psychopathology. New coverage includes use of assessments in forensic applications.

• Encompasses test development, psychometrics, and assessment measures
• Covers assessment for all age groups
• Includes formal testing, interviews, and behavioral observation as testing measures
• Details assessments for intelligence, aptitude, achievement, personality, and psychopathology
• New coverage of assessments used in forensic psychology
• New coverage on assessments with ethnic minorities

Part I

Introduction

Outline

• 1 Historical perspectives

1

Historical perspectives

Gerald Goldstein¹, Daniel N. Allen² and John DeLuca³, ¹VA Pittsburgh Healthcare System, Pittsburgh, PA, United States, ²Department of Psychology, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, NV, United States, ³Kessler Foundation Research Center, West Orange, NJ, United States

Abstract

The first edition of the Handbook of Psychological Assessment was published with Michel Hersen in 1984, followed by the second edition in 1990 and a third edition in 1999. The historical material presented in the third edition is reproduced in this chapter and updated with developments that have occurred in the almost 20 years since publication of that edition. In the first edition, we indicated that “A test is a systematic procedure for comparing the behavior of two or more persons.” This definition of a test was offered by Lee Cronbach many years ago (1949/1960) and probably still epitomizes the major content of psychological assessment, although in recent years a distinction is made between testing and assessment, with assessment being the broader concept. Assessment acknowledges that testing is one way to evaluate individuals but also that there are other ways of evaluating individual differences, such as interviewing and behavioral observation. Assessment has become a part of Western culture and almost all individuals are exposed to testing in some form during their lifetimes. In this chapter, we review the historical foundations for the main forms of psychological assessment that are currently in use. Intelligence and achievement testing, projective and objective personality assessment, neuropsychological assessment, and behavioral assessment are included. We end the chapter with brief discussion of recent developments such as the increase use of technology in the administration and interpretation of psychological tests, the rapid development of neuropsychological assessment procedures, concerns regarding test fairness and culture, continued development of objective personality tests, and ongoing efforts directed at expanding structured and semistructured interview procedures. Each of these emerging areas is covered in much greater detail in individual chapters of this Handbook. It is apparent that psychological assessment continues to evolve with many recent changes concerning several of its important aspects, a consideration that provided the impetus for publishing this fourth edition of the Handbook of Psychological Assessment.

Keywords

Psychometrics; intelligence testing; achievement testing; objective and projective personality assessment; behavioral assessment; history

Introduction

The first edition of the Handbook of Psychological Assessment was published with Michel Hersen in 1984, followed by a second edition in 1990 and a third in 1999. In this chapter of the present edition we reproduce the historical material presented earlier with some modifications and provide an update of historical developments during the almost 20 years since the appearance of the last edition. We began the first edition indicating that “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 to 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 canceled 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 and virtual reality applications. Psychometrics is now an advanced branch of mathematical and statistical science, and the administration, scoring, and even interpretation of tests has become increasingly objectified and automated. There are numerous books and scientific journals now devoted entirely to assessment. 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 the classroom and grading them at home has given way to the extensive use of automated procedures administered to large portions of the population by representatives of large 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. The presence of testing laboratories equipped with computers in clinical and educational settings is now not uncommon.

In recent years, there has 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 is 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 others, including interviewing, observations of behavior in natural or structured settings, and the 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 and achievement testing

The testing of intelligence in school children was probably the first major occupation of clinical psychology. However, advocacy efforts to improve the quality of education, such as the “No Child Left Behind” federal program, have become associated with substantially increased use of testing of academic abilities. Tests of reading, writing, and mathematical abilities have become increasingly used over the past several decades. 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 population-based 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. These tests were generally designed to allow for the assessment of large groups of individuals in situations where individually administered tests were impractical. The old Army Alpha and Beta tests, developed for the intellectual screening of large groups of inductees into the armed forces during the First World War, were among the first examples of these instruments. In recent times efficiencies afforded by group testing have been assisted by self-administration of tests using computers.

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. Factor analysis has provided support for various models describing the structure of intelligence, and has expanded early conceptualizations of intelligence as composed primarily of verbal and nonverbal abilities or fluid and crystallized abilities to the more complex models now used to describe the structure of the Wechsler scales and hierarchies of general, broad, and narrow abilities that typify the Cattell–Horn–Carroll theory (McGrew, 2005).

Another highly significant aspect of intelligence testing has to do with its clinical utilization. The IQ now essentially defines the borders of intellectual ability and disability, formerly called mental retardation, and intelligence tests are widely used to identify disabled children in educational settings [American Psychiatric Association (APA), Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th ed., (DSM-5, 2013)]. However, intelligence testing has gone far beyond the attempt to identify intellectually disabled 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, Gill, & Schafer, 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 possibly 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 by the clinician to examine various cognitive processes in order to make inferences 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 is probably 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 and behavior; of looking at various language and nonverbal abilities in brain-damaged patients; and of identifying patterns of abnormal thought processes seen in schizophrenia, autism, and other patient groups. As the theoretical models proposed to understand IQ have become increasingly complex there has been an accompanying increase in the development of various index scores to reflect performance on current versions of intelligence tests. 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 child and adult versions of the Wechsler intelligence scales reflect the major impacts cognitive psychology and neuropsychology have had on the way in which intelligence is currently conceptualized and intelligence test results are currently interpreted.

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. From a long-term perspective, it would appear that two major philosophies and perhaps three assessment methods have emerged. The two philosophies can be traced back to Allport’s (1937) distinction between nomothetic versus idiographic...

Índice

• Cover image
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• Dedication
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Part I: Introduction
• Part II: Psychometric Foundations
• Part III: Assessment of Intelligence
• Part IV: Achievement and Interest
• Part V: Neuropsychological Assessment
• Part VI: Interviewing
• Part VII: Personality Assessment
• Part VIII: Behavioral Assessment
• Part IX: Special Topics and Applications
• Index