Week 1 - Advanced Assessment and Intervention

Question 1

What are psychometrics?

Answer 1

Psychometrics deals with the scientific measurement of individual differences (personality and intelligence)

❖ It attempts to measure the psychological qualities of individuals and use that knowledge to make predictions about behaviour
❖ Dawis (1992) suggests that the intention and development of psychometric tests in psychology is comparable in its impact to the invention of the microscope in biology

Question 2

What is a psychological test?

Answer 2

A systematic procedure for obtaining samples of behaviour, relevant to cognitive or affective functioning, and for scoring and evaluating those 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

Question 3

What is an inventory?

Answer 3

used, for example, in assessing personality factors (e.g. Personality Assessment Inventory: PAI).
- Personality inventories do not measure how much personality that a person has, but rather the individual’s profile across a series of dimensions

Question 4

What is a scale?

Answer 4

A whole test made up of several parts, e.g., the Stanford Binet Intelligence Scale
The sub test, or set of items within a test, the measures are distinct and measure a discrete characteristic, e.g., the depression scale from the MMPI

Question 5

What are the 3 reasons psychological tests are used?

Answer 5

1. Undertaking the pragmatic process of making decisions about people, either as individuals or in groups
2. For the purpose of scientific research on psychological phenomena and individual differences, and
3. In the context of the therapeutic process of promoting self understanding and psychological adjustment

Question 6

What is an assessment and what is a test?

Answer 6

Assessment refers to the entire process of collating information about individuals and subsequently using it to make predictions

Tests represent only one source of information within the assessment process

Question 7

What are the two main types of psychometric tests?

Answer 7

Tests of cognitive ability (individually / group administered)
o Cognitive assessment tests attempt to measure an individuals
ability to process information from their environment

Tests of personality (objective / projective)
o Personality measures are more concerned with people’s dispositions to behave in certain ways in certain situations

Question 8

what are the 3 main areas that intelligence tests are commonly used?

Answer 8

Neuropsychology
Occupational psychology
Educational psychology

Question 9

What is a true score in reliability and the formula?

Answer 9

true score is conceptualised as the average score in a hypothetical distribution of scores that would be obtained if the individual took the same test an infinite number of times

impossible to obtain, so:
- observed score = (true score + error)

goal of assessment is to maximize true score variance and minimize error

Question 10

What are the 3 sources of error in psychological testing?

Answer 10

• context in which testing takes place
• test taker
• test itself

Question 11

What are the sources of assessment error?

Answer 11

• measurement error (assessment is ‘picture in time’)
• tests are not perfectly valid (some error is intrinsic to every test, better tests have less error)
• sampling error (caused by observing a sample instead of population)
• scoring/administration error (intra-rater reliability, inter-rater reliability)
• patient variables (education, culture, occupation factors, motivation)
  TEST SCORE = SYNDROME + MEASUREMENT ERROR + PREMORBID ABILITY + EFFORT + PRACTICE

Question 12

What is reliability?

Answer 12

refers to a consistency in measuring a construct

A test is only as valid as it is reliable

If a test is described as reliable, implication is that reliability has been established permanently for all uses and users

Question 13

What is test-retest reliability?

Answer 13

How consistent across time assuming that the construct does not change over time

Question 14

What is internal consistency?

Answer 14

How consistent items within a test are at measuring the overall construct

Question 15

What is Cronbach’s α ?

Answer 15

a measure of internal consistency, that is, how closely related a set of items are as a group.

an estimate of the reliability equivalent to the average of all the possible split half coefficients that would result from all possible ways of splitting the test in half

Question 16

what are the low and high reliability coefficient scores?

Answer 16

Low reliability estimates (below 0.70) suggest that the scores one derives from a test may not be very trustworthy

Most test users look for coefficients to be at least in the range of 0.80 or higher

Question 17

What is validity?

Answer 17

Tests can be reliable (they measure something consistently), but not valid (they don’t measure what the authors claim or presume)

To be valid, tests must measure what they were designed to assess

Question 18

What is construct validity?

Answer 18

degree to which a test is meaningfully correlated with tests that measure similar constructs and is unrelated to conceptually dissimilar or irrelevant measures
❖ “Good” tests should correlated moderately with conceptually similar tests (e.g., dominance and aggression). If they do, this is evidence for convergent validity
❖ “Good” tests should also not correlate with dissimilar tests (e.g., aggressions and IQ). If they do not, then this is evidence for discriminant validity
❖ Both convergent and discriminant validity indicate that a test has sound construct validity

Question 19

What is content validity?

Answer 19

degree to which a test measures what is was originally designed or intended to measure
❖ Example: IQ tests
o Does a given IQ test actually measure IQ rather than something else, such as motivation to succeed in school or to appear smart in the eyes of others?

Question 20

what is internal validity?

Answer 20

a way to measure if your research/assessment is sound (i.e., was the research done properly?)
❖ It is related to how many confounding variables you have in your experiment. If you run an experiment and avoid confounding variables your internal validity is high; the more confounding variables you have, the lower your internal validity
❖ In a perfect world, your experiment would have a high internal validity. This would allow you to have high confidence that the results of your experiment are caused by only one independent variable.

Question 21

What is conclusion validity?

Answer 21

only concerned with the question based on the data, is there a relationship or isn’t there? It doesn’t delve into specifics (like reliability tests) about what kinds of relationship exist
❖ For example:
o Let’s say you ran some research to find out if two years of preschool is more effective than one. Based on the data, you conclude that there’s a positive relationship between how well a child does in school and how many years of preschool they attend. Conclusion validity will tell you how reliable that conclusion is.

Question 22

What is external (ecological) validity?

Answer 22

occurs when the causal relationship discovered in your experimentation can be generalised to other people, times and contexts
❖ Do research findings in the lab generalize to real world settings?

Question 23

What is criterion-related validity?

Answer 23

comparison of a measure against a single measure that is supposed to be a direct measure of the concept under study.