PSY598 - Advanced Psychological Assessment

respect

• psychologists regard people as intrinsically valuable & respect their rights

• conduct promotes equity & protection of human rights, legal rights & moral rights

propriety

• psychologists ensure they are competent to deliver the psychological services they provide; benefit not harm

• protect the interests of the people

• welfare & the standing of the profession take precedence over a psychologist’s self interest

integrity

• psychologists acknowledge that their profession, knowledge and information place them in a position of power & trust

• act with strong moral principles and honesty

psychological testing

one of the tools commonly used in psychological assessment

psychological assessment

broader process aiming to answer referral questions

criterion referencing

comparison to a standard; gives meaning to a test score by specifying the standard that needs to be reached in relation to a set of behaviours.

e.g., for driving, can a person start the car? stop the car? go straight and turn?

norm referencing

comparison against other people; gives meaning to a test score by relating it to the performance of an appropriate reference or "norm" group

z score

describes a value’s relationship to the mean of a group of values

M = 0, SD = 1

t-scores

score standardised to a distribution with a M = 50, SD = 10

scaled scores

score standardised to a distribution with M = 10, SD = 3

barnum effect

tendency to accept vague and generic personality descriptions as highly accurate and specific to them, even when the descriptions are broad.

e.g., horoscopes, character assessments

personality

unique characteristics, qualities or tendencies of a person that are considered stable, enduring and largely predictive of future behaviour; we’re an interaction between nature & nurture.

Five Factor Model

OCEAN or CANOE

• Factors defined by groups of intercorrelated traits

• Not a complete theory alone

• Descriptive and predictive

• Assumes natural language provides for all socially meaningful interactions

NEO-PI-3

Holland’s RIASEC model

stratified sampling

1. Subjects divided into subgroups called strata based on shared characteristics (e.g., race, gender, educational attainment).

2. Random sampling of subgroups to collect representative data.

Ensures each subgroup of the population is adequately represented in the data.

random sampling

every member of a population has an equal probability of being selected

percentile

expression of the position of a score in a distribution of scores by dividing the distribution into 100 equal parts.

deviation IQ

allows an individual’s score to be compared with same-age peers

M=100; SD=15

cluster sampling

Cluster sampling divides the population into heterogeneous groups (clusters), and then entire clusters are randomly selected

sensitivity

proportion of actual cases detected

% of True positives / actual cases

specificity

proportion of non-cases accurately cleared

% of true negatives / total non-cases