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]).

Clinical Interviews

Irl interviewers designed to get theoretical focus. Unstructed are open-ended, while structured ones are specfic (mental status exam).

Limitations

• Lack accuracy
• Interviewer may be bias or make judgemental errors.
• Not very reliable
• Interviewing may be too subjective to be used as a measuring stick.

Clinical tests

A device to gain info about certain parts of one's psycho functioning from which we can draw bigger conclusions.

6 kinds of clinical tests include:

1. Clinical Tests: Projective Tests: Ambiguous material, people respond to it. They 'projects' parts of their persona. Used by psychodynamic clinicians to see 'unconscious drives'. This includes TAT (dramatic story of black and white pictures), Rorschach test (10 ink blots create an image that has a good idea of their psychology), sentence-completion tests, and drawings (draw human figures and talk about them). Strengths: Used popularily until 1950s, now used as an extra. Limitations: Not very reliable, not very valid either and could be prejudice.
2. Personality Inventories: Measure broad persona characteristics, emphasis on behaviors, beliefs, and feelings. Is self-reported. Mostly uses the MMPI. MMPI is 500 statements, true/false/cannot say, above 70 is a "deviant". Use it to create a profile. Strengths: Easy, cheap, fast. Objective scoring, good reliability. Limitations: Not very valid, measured traits cannot be thoroughly assessed, and tests don't account for cultural differences.
3. Response Inventories: