Assessment tools in psychology

We all are involved in behavioural observation because we observe the behaviour of people around us and arrive at conclusions about their actions. We can conclude that somebody is very aggressive, or that somebody comes to class late most of the time. In such each case, we are able to find out the particular behaviour of the individual through observation. Psychologists make observation in a more systematic and logical fashion order to avoid jumping into subjective and unreliable or behaviour unrealistic conclusions.

They therefore critically and objectively observe human behaviour and conclude accordingly. Observation however does not end with human behaviour only; events, situations, and phenomena can also be observed and described. However, when observation is focused on human behaviour only, it is specifically regarded as behavioural observation. While observation, as concept, is generic, behavioural a observation is specific to human behaviour. In behavioural observation, the observer whether a clinician or a teacher, observes the individual and records the frequency of the specific or target behaviour as well as any other relevant factors associated with the behaviour.

For example, a behavioural observer of a hyperactive child might count and record the number of times, say in 5 minutes, the child gets out of his seat. Usually events that precede the target behaviour are referred to as antecedents, and events following the behaviour are called consequences. Both the antecedents and consequences are usually recorded and analyzed in order to understand the target behaviour better.

In the case of the hyperactive child getting out of his seat, some of the antecedent behaviours could be that he was mocked by his seat mates, or he was asked some questions by the teacher or he was unable to understand the lesson, and so on. Under the circumstance, he joins the patients in their kind of plays and games for many session during which he can observe and record his experiences.

He then adopts any appropriate observation method through which information could be obtaine about the target behaviour of the subjects. Observation cuts across all forms of scientific study human behaviour and things, both inside and outside the laboratory. The scientist makes critical observation of h experimental set-up in order to obtain results. Observation is a common denominator in all forms of investigation o enquiry.

Observation, as a means of study of human behaviour uses anecdotal records, rating scales and checklists to record observational results or outcomes. Apart from behavioural observation by the investigator the subject or client can be instructed to observe himself herself. This is referred to as self-observation or Self-monitoring, Self-monitoring is a technique in which the subject keeps a record of details especially frequency of specified behaviours as well as the antecedents and consequences of such behaviours.

The technique guides both the client and clinician to gain more knowledge and information about the behaviour problem. Mental health assessment tools are not just for adults. There are many screening tools to assist in the diagnosis and treatment of children and youth. Examples include:. A mental health assessment typically begins with a patient scheduling an appointment with their general practitioner. The GP will conduct physical examinations and other medical tests.

Once they have ruled out the presence of physical illness, they will then refer the patient to a mental health specialist, who will complete a brief problem checklist and administer further mental health assessment forms.

These tests will be formal and standardized or informal and non-standardized. They can be self-reported assessments completed by the patient or conducted by a therapist. Some standard formats for mental health assessments are:.

To use this tool well, pay close attention to your patient and observe them with a professional, neutral demeanor. Psychiatric interviews can help you establish a relationship with your patients and collect information about their symptoms and experiences.

Allow your patients to speak without interruption and guide their responses with open-ended questions. Keep diagnostic reasoning in mind while you ask questions. If you want to build trust with your patients, ensure they feel validated and understood. Allowing your patients to present their feelings and experiences can reveal the factors contributing to their symptoms. You may want to review the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act before getting family members involved.

A targeted list can be a quick and efficient way to supplement your knowledge. The DSM-5 contains lists to identify and classify patient symptoms, but you should use these lists with caution. However, checklists can be appropriate tools when used in conjunction with other assessment methods. Rating scales provide numerical data and help patients sort confusing feelings and emotions into simple responses.

They can be valuable when working with patients who have difficulty communicating about their illness or as a general assessment tool to determine the severity of symptoms at a given point.

Assessment questionnaires function like screening questionnaires, except they often go into greater detail about a specific illness and its severity. If screening test results show the potential for particular disorders, a disorder-specific assessment can help you gather further data. One typical standardized assessment includes the Global Mental Health Assessment Tool, which can screen and assess various mental health issues.

Throughout these assessments, clinicians also take note of a patient's appearance, behavior, attitude, mood, insight, cognition and more. All of the information collected from health assessments and tools can now be used to compile a profile that provides a big-picture view of your patient's mental and behavioral health.

Our software is always HIPAA compliant and ensures the privacy of your notes, including prevention of alteration or destruction of your records. At nearly 1, pages, the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders DSM-5 contains hundreds of potential disorders you may see in your facility. Administering detailed assessments for all possible problems would be illogical and time-consuming, which is why clinicians use screening tools.

Here are some crucial differences between screening and assessment tools. Mental health screening and assessment tools are beneficial because they help clinicians diagnose and treat patients quickly and accurately. Understanding the different types of screening and assessment tools available allows you to make an informed decision for each patient.

In some situations, your patient may not recognize the symptoms and disorders they are experiencing. General mental health screenings like the Kessler Psychological Distress Scale, Patient Stress Questionnaire or My Mood Monitor checklist check for early signs of mental health symptoms.

Primary care doctors may also use these screenings during regular checkups to refer at-risk patients to behavioral and mental health specialists. If your patient shows signs of depression or has a family history of depression, screenings like the Patient Health Questionnaire PHQ may help give a more definitive answer.

Screenings for drug and alcohol use may help identify destructive habits or addictions in patients. To help identify symptoms of bipolar disorder, clinicians may use the Mood Disorder Questionnaire. Because bipolar disorders exist on a spectrum, it may also help to use the Bipolar Spectrum Diagnostic Scale to determine where or if your patient registers.

Anxiety disorder screening can help you determine if your patient exhibits symptoms of generalized anxiety disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, panic disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder PTSD or social phobia. This tool checks for common sources of PTSD or extreme distress.

Talk to your patient to determine which screenings may be necessary. After you have highlighted areas of concern, you can use assessment tools to understand the depth and scope of individual problems. Different age ranges have unique needs regarding screening tools.

For example, a young child might lack the vocabulary to describe their symptoms as fluently and accurately as an adult can. They need a screening test they can respond to. Here are recommendations for depression and anxiety screening — two of the most common mental disorders — for various age groups. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention , 3. Depression is a risk factor for substance use , suicide, declining academic performance and poor health choices.

In particular, teens might repress their feelings or turn to friends rather than adults for help with depression or anxiety. Fortunately, screening tests help physicians and behavioral health professionals catch depression and anxiety early on, so they can begin treatment.

The U. Preventive Services Task Force USPSTF recommends that primary care physicians screen adolescents aged 12 to 18 for major depressive disorder if the clinician can ensure an accurate diagnosis and effective treatment. Effective and widely used screening tools for depression in adolescents are the PHQ-9 and the Patient Questionnaire for Adolescents — a slightly modified version of the PHQ You might also use the Kutcher Adolescent Depression Scale to screen for depression in patients ages 12 to Pediatricians, psychiatrists and other health professionals might use the Pediatric Symptom Checklist , a short questionnaire, to screen for depression and anxiety in children ages 4 to The Child Depression Inventory, a modified version of the Beck Depression Inventory, is another way to screen for depression in children ages 7 to Parents can collect the information to help a young child complete a screening test.

Anxiety is even more common than depression in childhood and adolescence, with 7. What does identical mean? The score at test and the score at retest are correlated with one another. If the test is reliable, the correlation should be very high remember, a correlation goes from In addition to reliability, we want to make sure the test measures what it says it measures.

This is called validity. If the new test measures depression, then the scores on it should be highly comparable to the ones obtained by the BDI. This is called concurrent or descriptive validity. We might even ask if an assessment tool looks valid. If we answer yes, then it has face validity, though it should be noted that this is not based on any statistical or evidence-based method of assessing validity.

An example would be a personality test that asks about how people behave in certain situations. Therefore, it seems to measure personality, or we have an overall feeling that it measures what we expect it to measure.

Predictive validity is when a tool accurately predicts what will happen in the future. We would have high school students take it by their senior year and then wait until they are in college for a few years and see how they are doing. If they did well on the SAT, we would expect that at that point, they should be doing well in college. If so, then the SAT accurately predicts college success.

The same would be true of a test such as the Graduate Record Exam GRE and its ability to predict graduate school performance.

Finally, we want to make sure that the experience one patient has when taking a test or being assessed is the same as another patient taking the test the same day or on a different day, and with either the same tester or another tester. Equally important is that mental health professionals interpret the results of the testing in the same way, or otherwise, it will be unclear what the meaning of a specific score is. So how do we assess patients in our care? We will discuss observation, psychological tests, neurological tests, the clinical interview, and a few others in this section.

In Section 1. One-way mirrors can also be used. A limitation of this method is that the process of recording a behavior causes the behavior to change, called reactivity. Have you ever noticed someone staring at you while you sat and ate your lunch? If you have, what did you do? Did you change your behavior? Did you become self-conscious? Likely yes, and this is an example of reactivity. Another issue is that the behavior made in one situation may not be made in other situations, such as your significant other only acting out at the football game and not at home.

This form of validity is called cross-sectional validity. We also need our raters to observe and record behavior in the same way or to have high inter-rater reliability. The clinical interview. The interview may be unstructured in which open-ended questions are asked, structured in which a specific set of questions according to an interview schedule are asked, or semi-structured , in which there is a pre-set list of questions, but clinicians can follow up on specific issues that catch their attention.

A mental status examination is used to organize the information collected during the interview and systematically evaluates the patient through a series of questions assessing appearance and behavior. The latter includes grooming and body posture, thought processes and content to include disorganized speech or thought and false beliefs, mood and affect such that whether the person feels hopeless or elated, intellectual functioning to include speech and memory, and awareness of surroundings to include where the person is and what the day and time are.

The exam covers areas not normally part of the interview and allows the mental health professional to determine which areas need to be examined further.

The limitation of the interview is that it lacks reliability, especially in the case of the unstructured interview. Psychological tests and inventories. They can be administered either individually or to groups in paper or oral fashion. Projective tests consist of simple ambiguous stimuli that can elicit an unlimited number of responses. They include the Rorschach or inkblot test and the Thematic Apperception Test which asks the individual to write a complete story about each of 20 cards shown to them and give details about what led up to the scene depicted, what the characters are thinking, what they are doing, and what the outcome will be.

Another projective test is the sentence completion test and asks individuals to finish an incomplete sentence. Personality inventories ask clients to state whether each item in a long list of statements applies to them, and could ask about feelings, behaviors, or beliefs.

These inventories have the advantage of being easy to administer by either a professional or the individual taking it, are standardized, objectively scored, and can be completed electronically or by hand.

That said, personality cannot be directly assessed, and so you do not ever completely know the individual. Neurological tests. Neurological tests are used to diagnose cognitive impairments caused by brain damage due to tumors, infections, or head injuries; or changes in brain activity. It begins by injecting the patient with a radionuclide that collects in the brain and then having them lie on a scanning table while a ring-shaped machine is positioned over their head. Images are produced that yield information about the functioning of the brain.

Magnetic Resonance Imaging or MRI provides 3D images of the brain or other body structures using magnetic fields and computers. It can detect brain and spinal cord tumors or nervous system disorders such as multiple sclerosis.

Finally, computed tomography or the CT scan involves taking X-rays of the brain at different angles and is used to diagnose brain damage caused by head injuries or brain tumors. Physical examination. Many mental health professionals recommend the patient see their family physician for a physical examination, which is much like a check-up. Some organic conditions, such as hyperthyroidism or hormonal irregularities, manifest behavioral symptoms that are similar to mental disorders.

Ruling out such conditions can save costly therapy or surgery. Behavioral assessment. Within the realm of behavior modification and applied behavior analysis, we talk about what is called behavioral assessment , which is the measurement of a target behavior.

The target behavior is whatever behavior we want to change, and it can be in excess and needing to be reduced, or in a deficit state and needing to be increased. The person does their own measuring and recording of the ABCs, which is called self-monitoring.

In the context of psychopathology, behavior modification can be useful in treating phobias, reducing habit disorders, and ridding the person of maladaptive cognitions. Intelligence tests. An example is the Stanford-Binet Intelligence test , which assesses fluid reasoning, knowledge, quantitative reasoning, visual-spatial processing, and working memory.

Also, can we really assess intelligence through one dimension, or are there multiple dimensions? Clinical diagnosis is the process of using assessment data to determine if the pattern of symptoms the person presents with is consistent with the diagnostic criteria for a specific mental disorder outlined in an established classification system such as the DSM-5 or ICD both will be described shortly.

Any diagnosis should have clinical utility, meaning it aids the mental health professional in determining prognosis, the treatment plan, and possible outcomes of treatment APA, Receiving a diagnosis does not necessarily mean the person requires treatment. This decision is made based upon how severe the symptoms are, level of distress caused by the symptoms, symptom salience such as expressing suicidal ideation, risks and benefits of treatment, disability, and other factors APA, Likewise, a patient may not meet the full criteria for a diagnosis but require treatment nonetheless.

Symptoms that cluster together regularly are called a syndrome.