Intro to Psych Assessment Flashcards
What does the MMPI Measure
Mental Health Needs - eg. psychological disorders
What is the Mean and SD of the MMPI
M = 50, SD = 10 (scores as a t-test)
What is the most popularly used IQ test?
Stanford Binet V
What is the Mean and SD of the Stanford Binet Inventory?
M = 100, SD = 15
What does the NEO-PIR measure
Personality variables (big 5)
How often are many psychological tests updated
Approx. every 10 years
Why are tests updated regularly
Because cultural and social values change and the tests need to be updated to reflect these
What is meant by Reliability?
Consistency of measurement of a test
What is Psychological Research?
Psych Research aims to make generalisations about a population from a sample of people.
What is Psychological Assessment?
A special kind of Psych research which seeks to make generalisations about specific individuals with a sample n=1
What is test-retest reliability?
When scores from the same test administered at different times are highly correlated at diff. time points (ie. r = close to 1)
What is the importance of a CI as it relates to test scores?
Because it provides a range of values between which you’d expect the test score to fall.
Why is consistency (reliability) important?
Because we want to know that our assessment of needs at one point is similar to our assessment of your needs at a future time . The test should not just refer to your needs in the moment, but generalise to your needs across time.
What is Psychological Testing?
The process of administering one or more psychological test.
What is validity?
Assesses the usefulness of inferences made from test scores.
How are testing and theory interconnected?
They are two aspects of the same thing, with good theory we can develop good tests and vice versa.
Psychometric theory is cumulative
There has been no serious rebuttal to psychometric theory.
Why is variance in psychological testing a good thing?
Because a test with good reliability that produces a wider spread of scores allows us to identify individuals more easily than a test with lower variability.
When is variance in psychological testing a bad thing?
When it is caused by error/noise (measurement error) rather than by actual individual differences.
What two types of variance exist in psychological testing?
- Individual variability (good)
2. Error/random variability aka measurement error (bad)
What is a good way of measuring Reliability.
The extent to which a test correlates with itself. High correlation = good reliability
Test-Retest reliability.
What are the two components of an observed score?
X (observed score) = T (true score) + E (error)
What are the assumptions of general model of reliability?
- Mean error of measurement = 0 (because it is random)
- True scores and errors are uncorrelated r the = 0
- Errors on different measurements are uncorrelated r e1e2 = 0
What are the formulas for test scores from classical test theory?
X=T+E
and
σ^2X = σ^2T + σ^2E (variance version)