By a rough estimate, more than 80% of all published assessment methods will be questionnaires or objective tests. As we shall see in this section, the range of possible assessment data sources extends considerably farther though. And in practical assessment work too psychologists tend to complement (cross-check or simply expand) their assessment by some or several non-questionnaire and nontest methods.
For example, in clinical assessments behaviour observation and interview data, often also psycho physiological data are considered essential additional information, as is interview and actuarial/biographical data in industrial/ organisational assessments. You can refer to Pawlik (1996, 1998) for details of this classification of data sources.
1. Actuarial and Biographical Data : This category refers to descriptive data about a person’s life history, educational, professional and medical record, possibly also criminal record.
Age, type and years of schooling, nature of completed professional education/vocational training, marital status, current employment and positions held in the past, leisure activities, and past illnesses and hospitalisations are examples of actuarial and biographical data.
As a rule, such data is available with optimum reliability and often represents indispensable information, for example, in clinical and industrial/organisational assessments. Special biographical check list-item assessment instruments may be available in a given language and culture for special applications.
2. Behaviour Trace : This refers to physical traces of human behaviour like handwriting specimen, products of art and expression (drawings, compositions, poems or other kinds of literary products), left-overs after play in a children’s playground, style (tidy or untidy, organised or ‘chaotic) of self-devised living environment at home, but also attributes of a person’s appearance (e.g., bitten finger nails!) and attire.
While at times perhaps intriguing, also within a wider humanistic perspective, the validity of personality assessments based on behaviour traces can be rather limited. For example, graphology (handwriting analysis) has been known for a long time to fall short of acceptable validity criteria in carefully conducted validation studies (Guilford, 1959; Rohracher, 1969).
On the other hand, behaviour trace variables may provide valuable information in clinical contexts and at the process stage of developing assessment hypotheses.
3. Behaviour Observation : In some sense, behaviour observation will form part of each and every assessment. In the present context the word observation is used in a more restricted sense, though, referring to direct recording/ monitoring, describing, and operational classification of human behaviour, over and above what may be already incorporated in the scoring rationale of a questionnaire, an interview schedule, or an objective test.
Examples of behavior observation could be: studying the behaviour of an autistic child in a playground setting; monitoring the behaviour of a catatonic patient on a 24-hour basis; observing a trainee’s performance in a newly designed work place; or self monitoring of mood swings by a psychotherapy patient in administering questionnaires and objective tests, starting in the 1920s and 1930s,has pushed careful, systematic behaviour observation to the side of the assessment process.
Only in recent years, especially within clinical assessment and treatment contexts following behavior therapeutic approaches, is the potential value of behaviour ratings for the assessment process being re-discovered.
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