Assessment L1 - Principles of Assessment Flashcards
What is the medicolegal standard for assessment?
- medicolegal standard = appropriate benchmark
- defensive practice*
- that Clinicians need to be held ACCOUNTABLE for the things that they say and do - the only time psychs are really held accountable is in court.
- near enough is not good enough.
- Client has legal right to expect they will be treated INNOCENT UNTIL PROVEN GUILTY.
What does it mean if a clinician cannot prove that a deficit exists.
If you cannot find a reason to make a diagnosis - they are innocent.
Innocent until proven guilty.
What is an example of a poor treatment?
- Deep Sleep Therapy @ Chelmsford P Hospital - prolonged sleep treatment, used drugs to keep people unconscious.
- for depression, scz, depression, PMS, obesity & addiction
- 26 died
- Psychologist took part in ABHORRENT ASSESSMENT PRACTICE to justify intervention - low validity and reliability tests, tests were in shortened forms, combined with other shortened tests which exaggerated the problem and undermined the ability of valid tests.
what are the testing practices at chelmsford hospital known for?
- Deep sleep therapy
- inappropriate assessment practice
- low validity and reliability tests
- shorted forms tests combined with other shortened tests - exaggerating the problem and undermining valid tests
- using clinical judgements on relationships or profiles from combo of tests in the absence of adequate objective material.
- peculiar use of component traits in the case
- using clinical and subjective historical material without proper explanation of source of material when providing conclusions.
What do we refer to when we talk about the clash of culture between scientist practitioners and the courts of law?
- judicial process requires proof, science based on disproof
- judicial process requires facts, science provides theories and models
- judicial process requires uncertainty, science provides statements of probability and estimates of error.
–> science isn’t interested in individual performance, but rather group performance, by using measures of central tendency.
What is clinical decision making?
- the clinician OBSERVES the client, gathers DATA and formulates HYPOTHESIS about a client’s problem, processes this information in his or her head and then PREDICTS the OUTCOME.
What is statistical decision making
The human judge is ELIMINATED and conclusions rest solely upon the EMPIRICALLY ESTABLISHED relationships between data and the condition or event of interest.
- must be based on empirical FREQUENCIES or BASE RATES of occurrence of the particular pattern of results in the population of interest.
What is Meehl’s stance on decision making?
- He compared the predictive accuracy of clinical versus statistical methods
- Statistical methods were equal to or BETTER THAN clinical models in 19 of 20 studies..
- the 1 that didnt work was due to methodological error.
- examined 50 studies and reaffirmed what he found earlier.
there is no aspect of human behaviour hat cannot be rendered statistical decision making, just need to devise the parameters.
What is the Frye Standard?
- this is the test of admissibility of scientific evidence.
- evidence needs to be generally accepted by the scientific community
Used in Aus.
What is the Daubert Standard?
- Eliminates junk science & Pseudoscience
- If an expert presents evidence in a court of law, he must be able to present evidence whether the technique used can be falsified, it was peer reviewed and published, technique error rate and maintenance of controls, and whether theory is accepted generally in the scientific community.
What are psychometrics?
- deals with scientific measurement of individual differences. eg. personality and intelligence.
- attempts to measure the psychological qualities of individuals and use that knowledge to make predictions about behaviour
What is a ‘test’?
- A systematic procedure for obtaining samples of behaviour, relevant to cognitive or affective functioning and for scoring and evaluating responses according to standards which must be:
- OBJECTIVE - every observer of an event would produce an identical account of what took place
- SYSTEMATIC - A methodical and consistent approach to understanding an event.
- STANDARDISED - Observations of an event are made in a prescribed manner.
‘tests’ are only for those procedures in which the responses are evaluated based on their CORRECTNESS. or QUALITY.
EG. WAIS.
What is a ‘inventory’?
This is a psychological test which assess factors.
EG. PERSONALITY INVENTORY
Doesn’t measure quantify something, but rather, creates an individual profile of a series of dimensions.
What are tests used for?
3 PURPOSES:
1. Undertaking the pragmatic process of MAKING DECISIONS about people, as individuals or groups. Eg. Determining if someone is intellectually disabled.
- SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH on psychological phenomena and individual differences - eg. making theories based on the measurement. EG. SSRIs and depressive symptoms.
- THERAPEUTIC PROCESS of promoting self understanding and psychological adjustment - eg. wanting to know if people are getting better as a consequence of intervention
What is a ‘scale’?
EITHER:
- A WHOLE TEST made up of several parts - eg. stanford binet intelligence scale
- a SUBTEST, or set of items within a test, whose measures are distinct and measure discrete characteristics - eg. depression scale fro MMPI
In the psychometric context, SCALES are a group of items that pertain to a single variable which are arranged in order of difficulty or intensity. The process of producing this result is referring to as scaling.
> lowest items must discriminate the low performance, as well as from high performance.
notion of scaling takes place as a consequence of the construct naturally being distributed.
