Informal Psychological Assessment (by Douglas Quirk and Reg Reynolds) 

Psychological treatment is relatively easy (1) if your subject is available for treatment and (2) if you know what to treat. The latter is where psychological assessment comes in. Psychological assessment presents the subject with some standard stimulus package – a questionnaire or a set of abstract stimuli such as the Rorschach cards – and the examiner interprets the subject’s response. Some of the issues to be considered in interpreting the subject’s response ae discussed in the first paper in this manuscript, The Use of the MMPI in Teaching Personality Assessment.

In psychological test construction, it is highly desirable that the test be valid (i.e., that it measures what it purports to measure). There are several kinds of validity. Face validity is “on the face of it” validity. For example, if you are asked whether you are anxious in social situations and you reply that you are, the examiner might interpret your response as indicating that you are anxious in social situations. Concurrent validity is about whether your subject’s response to the standard stimulus situation provides essentially the same information as some other assessment device that you believe to be measuring what you are trying to measure. An example might be whether the subject’s claim to be anxious in social situations is supported by physiological indicators of arousal in those situations, which would provide at least presumptive evidence that the subject is indeed anxious in those social situations. Content validity is about covering the subject under consideration. The Addicause questionnaire, for example, was designed to determine the possible motivations for addictive behaviour, and it contains items covering all of the motivations that we could think of as possible motivations for addictive behaviour. Predictive validity concerns whether test results predict to some future bahaviour. For example, IQ test results are used to help determine how well someone might be expected to do in situations that require thinking ability.

For a psychological test to be published (and available for sale), it will have mutliple kinds of validity. While several of the assessment devices included in this manuscript approach that ideal, all of them were intended for our own use and none of them have undergone the rigorous development that would be required if they were to be published for use by other psychologists. The only reason for their inclusion here is so that thay are not quite so easily lost to posterity.

Most of these assessment devices are concerned with affect – anxiety, ager, or depression. The Addicause questionnaire was designed to determine the motivations underlying addictions, but really is about motivations in general. Opinions About Social Problems is used for determining moral development level, and the Survey of Thoughts, Feelings, and Behaviours is a measure of criminality.