assessment research methods assessing psych disorders purpose understand individual predict behavior when will this behavior come out plan treatment ways to assess interview testing clinical interview evaluate treatment outcome ex administer a test in the first and last sessions evaluate if treatment was effective behavioral observation what s happening in the session i e trouble making eye contact what things make patient uncomfortable anxious during session most common clinical assessment method structured or semi structured structured clinical interview for DSM disorders SCID to see if ppl meet criteria for certain disorders check off yes or no used in research studies another example of a structured assessment is the Beck Depression Inventory BDI it s a structured questionnaire self report in everyday clinical settings we often use semi structured interviews some questionnaires open ended vs leading questions reports from patients others in their life2 behavioral assessment focused on present observing self self monitoring ex getting someone to take note of each time they reach to pull their hair tie it to a more concrete trigger driving hair pulling observing others observe child s interaction w peers ecological momentary assessment EMA get alert on phone to tell you to write something down write down how you re feeling in that moment testing psychoanalytic roots objective tests projective testing patients respond to ambiguous test stimuli used by psychologists Rorschach inkblots you can get a sense of someone s personality unconscious based on what they see in the inkblots used mainly in hospitals and in NYC very structured scoring Thematic Apperception Test TAT series of cards where you ask someone to tell you a story very unstructured scoring you as a clinician look for themes across stories objective personality tests Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory MMPI multiple choice extensive reliability validity and normative database has a subscale to detect lying intelligence testing nature of intellectual functioning and IQ verbal domains vocabulary etc performance domains look at a picture find what s missing Weschler intelligence tests for adults WAIS and children WISC can be helpful for neuropsych testing neuropsychological testing used when there could be neurological issues trying to understand relationship btwn brain behavior Bender Visual Motor Gestalt show someone shapes they have to draw the shape Halstead Reitan more complex has many subtests one has to do w strength of your grip in each hand cultural bias in testing assessment environment in which someone grew up questions biased towards a specific group in the population some people can train for the test b c of financial means research underlies everything scientifically evaluate diagnosis assessment informs treatment for all disorders but it s hard to develop a perfect study sometimes research is lacking for some disorders other times we need to be critical of research that s been conducted validity internal validity are you measuring what you say you re measuring are we confident that A caused B all about the design of the study external validity has to do with generalizability can we actually apply our findings in the real world has to be replicated in the real world sometimes when you increase the internal validity it can lower external validity when we structure a study so much it can make it super unlike the real world tradeoff how do we increase internal validity have a control group use random assignment statistical vs clinical significance p value indicates a statistically significant difference should be less than 01 or 05 means that there is a 01 likelihood that these results could have occurred due to chance alone clinical significance is the difference meaningful effect size tells us how big of a change actually occurred in terms of the treatment ex how much less afraid of flying were the participants after participating in the study measures the strength of the phenomenon has to do w clinical significance b c it doesn t have to do w the size of the sample research designs 1 case study intensive study of one person or a few prelude to scientific investigation pros in depth easier to see what s going on cons can t generalize to other people can t compare to others higher risk of confounding variables a research design that compares different groups of individuals at one point in time 2 cross sectional can t make causal interpretations 3 longitudinal a research design that compares the same group of individuals at 2 or more points of time allows you to very carefully begin to make causal interpretations sometimes attempts to do pre trauma and post trauma tests 4 experimental research IV manipulated and dependent measured variables experiment determines how the IV affects the DV attempt to establish causal relationships random assignment randomly assign ppl to each of the 2 treatment groups double blind both participants and treatment provider don t know which condition you are in research fundamentals replication is the cornerstone of science and programmatic research research must occur in the context of ethical considerations and values importance of well designed research in assessment testing and in therapy we want research to demonstrate that these are valid tests methods