What are the six major processes that make up psychological assessment?

Conducting psychological assessment
Wright, A. J. (2011)
Introduction to part I: The hypothesis testing model.

Introduction

At its most basic, psychological assessment provides a catalogue of an individual’s cognitive, emotional, and psychological strengths, weaknesses, deficits, and resources.
At its best, it provides dynamic insights into the inner workings of an individual, yielding invaluable information for diagnosis, potential intervention and prognosis.

Psychological assessment should be used to help answer whatever referal questions are present and to make clear and specific recommendations to help the individual being assessed function better in his or her life.
The central goal of making useful (and realistic) recommendations should never be forgotten.

Six major processes that make up any psychological assessment

1. Conducting a clinical interview
2. Choosing a battery of tests
3. Administering, scoring, and interpreting tests
4. Integrating and conceptualizing information gathered from test results, the clinical interview, behavioural observations, and other sources
5. Writing a psychological assessment report
6. Providing feedback to the individual assessed and/or the referral source

The hypothesis testing model

The importance of psychological assessment lies in the fundamental assumption that there are aspects of our functioning that we are not entirely aware of or cannot effectively articulate.

It is important to not that testing and assessment provide a picture of how the individual being assessed is currently functioning. It measures individuals at that particular moment in time.

There is no perfect measure.
The hypothesis testing model uses the strengths of each individual test, as well as clinical acumen, while assuming that each individual measure is flawed.
Each individual assessment can be treated as a research study by

• Making hypotheses and testing them to rule out possibilities and incorporate others
• Using multiple tests and multiple methods, which provide more solid data and allow he assessor to be much more confident in his or her findings

Step 1: Clinical assessment

The first step of the hypothesis testing model is to conduct a thorough clinical interview.
You will then use the results of this interview, together with background information collected from various sources, to create hypothesis.
Clinical assessment: a combination of the information gathered from the clinical interview and other sources of report.
Clinical assessment has two goals

• Assessing impairment in functioning
  While some impairments may be overly evident, there are often more subtle impairments in functioning.
  Assessments are not entirely about weakness and impairment.
  • It is also a clear survey of what’s going right.
• Generating hypothesis
  For this, a thorough understanding of psychodiagnosis is necessary.
  General theories of behaviour, regardless of theoretical orientation, are also extremely important.
  Based on ‘findings’ of the clinical assessment, you should list all possible causes of the functional impairment.

Step 2: Selecting tests

Based on the hypothesis generated in step 1, the assessor selects a testing battery.
Tests should be chosen based on an established set of criteria, which should include their own internal psychometric