A psychodiagnostic examination can start in two ways: the client can be referred to the diagnostician or the client can go to the diagnostician himself. Once at the diagnostician, he analyzes the client's request for help as well as the referrer's request. These are not the same type of questions. The client's request for help could be about how to overcome his compulsive behavior, while the referrer's request might be about obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Based on these questions, the diagnostician asks three types of questions:
- Does she have an obsessive-compulsive disorder?
- What factors have caused this disorder and what factors perpetuate it?
- Which treatment is right for this patient?
A diagnostic scenario is drawn up based on these questions. This contains a preliminary theory about the client's behavior. Subsequently, this theory is tested using five steps:
- Hypotheses are formulated;
- A specific research tool is chosen that can help to test the hypotheses;
- Criteria are established for when the hypotheses are or are not rejected;
- The instruments are administered, and the results are analyzed;
- Based on the results, the hypotheses are accepted or rejected.
On the basis of this assessment, they will come to a diagnostic conclusion.
What is the diagnostic cycle?
It is useful to build up the psychodiagnostic process according to De Groot's empirical (scientific) cycle. This empirical cycle consists of observation, induction, deduction, testing and evaluation. Yet this is not standard applied by diagnosticians.
What are the 5 basic questions in clinical psychodiagnostics?
There are five types of questions that often arise in psychodiagnostics. With each of these questions it is important to have a certain knowledge of psychology (knowledge base). It is best if the diagnosis answers the five basic questions in sequence and goes through the steps in the diagnostic cycle. These are the five basic questions:
1. Recognition: What are the problems?
The question that can be asked here is: what is the problem, what succeeds and what goes wrong? The recognition phase includes an inventory, description, ordering, categorization and an estimate of the seriousness of the problem behavior. The difference between and a diagnostic formulation should be considered. Classification is about categorizing someone's behavior based on the DSM. A disadvantage of a categoric classification is that it is quite limited and leads to "labeling". An advantage is that it improves the communication between information. A diagnostic formulation, on the other hand, contains more detailed information about a client's behavior and takes more into account the context in which this behavior is in place. The authors of the book advocate a diagnostic formulation.
2. Explanation: Why are there problems?
The question that can be asked is 'why are the problems there?' The statement contains 3 parts:
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