Week 4 - Assessment in the Cultural Context and Across the Lifespan Flashcards
What does WEIRD stand for orientation
W - western E - Educated I - Industrialised R - Rich D - Democratic
(Groot, Le Grice & Nikora, 2019)
What is the relevance of culture in terms of shapes and influences?
Shapes:
- Which symptoms are expressed
- How they are expressed
Influences:
- The meaning given to symptoms
- What society deems appropriate or inappropriate
- Conceptualisation and rationale of psychiatric diagnostic
categories/groupings
- Matrix for clinician-patient exchange
Lancet Commission Report (Ottersen et al., 2014) Set of findings?
- Medicine should accommodate the culture construct of well being
- Culture should be better defined
- Culture should not be neglected in health and healthcare provision
- Culture should become central to care practices
- Clinical cultures should be reshaped
- People who are not healthy should be re-capacitated within the culture of
biomedicine - Agency should be better understood with respect to culture
- Training cultures should be better understood
- Competence should be reconsidered across all cultures and systems of care
- Exported and imported practices and services should be aligned with local cultural meaning
- The building of trust in healthcare should be prioritised as a cultural value
- New models of well-being and care should be identified and nourished across cultures
How to be a culturally aware psychologist?
- Reflecting on own culture
Bias | privilege - Learning and being open
Often means feeling challenged - Admitting when you are not the right person
Not every psychologist is the right psychologist for the right client
How to decolonise psychology
- colonisation is more than physical, also cultural and psychological. whose knowledge is privileged?
- decolonisations seeks to reverse and remedy this
Aboriginal health and wellbeing
- For First Nations people born between 2015 and 2017, life expectancy was estimated to be 71.6 years for males, 75.6 years for females, 7 to 10 years less than non-indigenous males and females
- Hospitalisation rates are 2.6 times higher
o Cardiovascular disease 1.2 times higher
o Cancer death rate 1.3 times higher
o Respiratory disease death rate 2 times higher
o Kidney health death rate 2.5 times higher
o Diabetes death rates 6 times higher for males, 4 times higher for females - Higher levels of reported stress
What is intergenerational trauma?
- Early trauma can have long lasting effects on brain regions which processes emotion
o Increasing vulnerability mental illness - Malignant grief
- Stolen generation
What is the KICA tools?
KIMBERLEY INDIGENOUS COGNITIVE ASSESSMENT
- Developed in response to need for a validated cognitive screening tool for older Aboriginal Australians living in rural and remote areas (like the MoCa)
- Adapted forms validated for Torres Strait Islander people and First Nations people living in urban/regional areas
- Full KICA includes components on cognition, depression, and family corroboration sections
o Shorter KICA-Screen has also been developed
what is cross cultural assessment?
- Use of standardised tests of intelligence and cognitive abilities with individuals who are culturally and/or linguistically different
o Concerns regarding the applicability - Four main issues
o Cultural loading and linguistic demands of standardised, norm- referenced tests
o Norm samples representation and stratification of different cultural groups
o Effects of cultural differences on performance tests
o Cross-cultural dynamics involving examiner and examinee
What are the two basic methods of test adaptation?
Forward translation: original test in sources language is translated into target language and then bilinguals are asked to compare the original version with adapted version (Hambleton, 1994)
Back translation: test is translated into target language and then re-translated back to the source language. Process can be repeated several times. Once complete, final back translated version is compared to the original version (Hambleton, 1994)
ADVANTAGES OF ADAPTING EXISTING INSTRUMENTS
- Ability to compare already existing data with newly acquired data, allowing for cross-cultural studies
- Conserves time and expenses
- Lead to increased fairness in assessment by allowing
individuals to be assessed in their language of choice - Greater generalisability
- Investigation of differences among a growing diverse population
DISADVANTAGES OF ADAPTING EXISTING INSTRUMENTS
- Risk of imposing conclusions based on concepts that exist in one culture, but may not exist in another
- No guarantees that the concept in the source culture exists in the target culture (Lonner & Berry, 1986)
- Misleading conclusion
o If certain constructs measured in the original version are not found in the target population, or if the construct is manifested in a different manner, the resulting scores can prove to be misleading (Hambleton, 1994)
What are the 4 types of test equivalence (Lonner, 1985)
Functional equivalence:
o Role or function that behaviour plays in different cultures. Conceptual equivalence
o Similarity in meaning attached to behavioural concepts. Metric equivalence
o Psychometric properties and indicates that scales measure the same construct in different cultures
Linguistic equivalence o Actual translation proces
What is test bias?
- Systematic error in measurement Culturally relevant
o Does the test or test items systemically discriminate against a cultural group? - May occur when the contents of the test are more familiar to one group than to another, or when the tests have differential predictive validity across groups
- Plays a significant role in cross-cultural assessment
o When test is developed in one culture, but used in another culture. There is potential for misinterpretation unless cultural issues are considered.
What is construct bias?
- Bias in the meaning of a test
- Not sufficient to provide evidence of construct validation for a majority group
What is method bias?
- Sample bias
- Instrument bias
- Administration bias
What is item bias?
- If item contains content or language that is differentially familiar to
subgroups - Item structure or format is differentially difficult for subgroups
WHAT IS A CULTURE FAIR TEST
- Culture fair testing is a timely issue given debate of bias in intelligence and educational testing
o Affects students who can speak and write English who are unfamiliar with white middle-class culture - Learning potential assessments device (DPAD)
- Culture free self esteem inventories
- Cattell culture fair series – intended to assess intelligence independent of cultural experience, verbal ability or educational level
What is the purpose of culture fair testing?
- to eliminate social or cultural advantages/disadvantages
- test can be administered by anyone, from any nation, speaking any language
- may help identify clients with
- duration varies, approx between 12-80 mins per section (usually 2-4 sections)
DESCRIPTION OF A CULTURE FAIR TEST (CFT)
- A non-verbal paper pencil test that can be administered to a young person (4 years old)
- Client only needs ability to recognise shapes and figures, and perceive their respective relationships
- Often referred to as a culture free test or unbiased test
- Many variations including class, economic, and intelligence tests
o Unifying theme is that they are designed to be culturally unbiased
