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Issues in Cross-Cultural Psychological Assessment Conference 2008
TRANS-CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES ON THE DESIGN AND USE OF PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSESSMENT INSTRUMENTS, AND ANALYSES OF DATA DERIVED FROM THEM:
DEVELOPERS, USERS AND CONSUMERS BEWARE
Keynote presentation
Dr Ken Rowe, Research Director, Learning Processes, Australian Council for Educational Research
Observational and self-report psychological inventories are used routinely by psychologists
and psychiatrists as assessment instruments to assist with the evaluation of human
cognitive, affective and behavioural functioning. They are also used in epidemiological
studies to obtain normative/prevalence estimates of persons with personality and
behavioural 'problems'. Advantages entailed in their use include ease of administration
and the convenience of obtaining estimates of psychosocial functioning from individuals
and large numbers of informants. However, there are two major problems in the design
and content of commonly used psychological assessment instruments. First, as a
consequence of cross-cultural variations within and between, socio-cultural groups, the
'portability' of such instruments in terms of understanding by respondents and subsequent
interpretation by clinicians is problematic at both the item and scale levels. Second,
serious decisions are frequently made on the basis of 'measures' obtained from such
instruments, including: selection/non-selection for further education and/or employment;
and the labelling of persons as 'pathologic', subsequent referral to intervention therapy
services, and prescription of medication by a physician.
This presentation highlights key substantive and methodological issues endemic to
the design and use of cognitive and psycho-behavioural rating inventories, and the
analyses of data derived from them - especially in multi-cultural contexts. Moreover, the
presentation provides evidence indicating that traditional psychometric methodologies
employed to construct 'scales' (typically from dichotomous and/or ordinal item-response
formats) and to report 'norms', that ignore the sampling, measurement, distributional and
structural properties of the derived data, have long since passed their 'use-by-date'. Also
demonstrated is that claims of volidity and reliability employing these traditional
methodologies can no longer be justified. Using data obtained from the administration of
psycho-behavioural rating inventories in several large-scale research projects, these issues
are illustrated and discussed in terms their substantive implications for cross-cultural
psychological assessment. The outcomes of more robust methodologies are presented
that stress the need to revise the design of psychological assessment instruments, and
point to the adoption of more rigorous approaches to measurement and analyses of the related data.
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