User:Atcovi/Psychopathology/Chapter 4

Clinical Assessment, Diagnosis, and Treatment

• Assessment: Bringing about relevant information to come up with a conclusion.
• Clinical assessment: The whether, how, and reasoning behind a person behaving 'abnormally' and how a professional can assist them.

Idiographic information: info about a certain individual, rather than the population.

Clinical assessment tools range from clinical interviews, clinical tests, and clinical observations. These tools need to be standardized, be reliable and valid.

What does it mean to be standardized?

• Common steps that need to be followed (fasting for glucose blood tests).
• Standardize administration/scoring/conclusions (don't include skewed groups).

What does relaibility mean?

• Consistency of a measured assessment (yield same results in same scenario).
• Divided between test-retest reliability (same test results for same people) and interrater reliability (separate judges agree on how to score and conclude a certain tool).

What does validity mean?

• Accuracy of a tool's result, so the tool must properly measure what it should measure (weight scale). An example is a broken weight that weights 200lb each time, which renders good reliability but poor validity.
• Three types: face validity (a tool measures what makes sense [time spent smiling --> mood]), predictive validity (a tool that correctly/sufficiently predicts future consequences [SAT score --> college success]), and concurrent validity (a tool's results agree well with other measures of similar behavior [anxiety test --> evidence of anxiety]).