Paradigms of Personality Assessment

Rating:
Summary: Fantastic Project
Review: This book represents a great project in psychology, a return to the assessment glory days of Schafer's Clinical Applications of Psychological Tests from 1948 and, more recently, Hurt, Reznikoff, and Clarkin's Psychological Assessment/Psychiatric Diagnosis/Treatment Planning volume from 1991. Like these other books, Paradigms offers more depth than the surveys of testing textbooks but more breadth than volumes examining a particular instrument. It goes a fantastic step further than any other book, in that it offers assessment of a client from five different examiners. This allows the reader to compare approaches and to see, in ways that are inexplicably rare in the psychological literature, how much assessments have in common across models and the amazing extent to which the various models can reveal the life of the test subject. A book like this refutes the nay-sayers of assessment and supports the findings of a 2001 American Psychologist survey that demonstrate how psychological testing possesses as much diagnostic power as most medical tests.

Wiggins' book has five teams of examiners conducting assessment with a single person. Although the subject is not a patient or engaged in behavioral health services, she presents with a rich psychic life and dramatic history that lend themselves to assessment. She agrees to undergo assessment with each team.

The Personological Assessment (Life History Interview) and the Empirical Assessment (MMPI)are conducted by a single examiner each; the other three Assessments are conducted by teams of two examiners each. The Personological Assessment and the Psychodynamic Assessment are conducted face-to-face with the subject, while the other three are conducted through paper-and-pencil tests and the examiners never actually meet the subject. The Psychodynamic Assessors opt to forego any background information to conduct a "blind assessment" in order to show the power of the Rorschach and other measures. Only the Mutivariate Assessment (using the NEO measure) employs input from a source other than the client, namely, her paramour.

The results of each of the five assessments constitutes the meat of the book. As noted, there is remarkable consistency in what each assessment reveals and the accuracy of these findings is supported by follow-up material that is not available to the examiners. In fact, the subject provides updates from three years later, allowing the reader to see how the examiners' various predictions fared. Collateral sources such as friends provide additional material that puts all the assessment findings in a context.

The five different assessment teams write their own chapters about the client. The writing therefore varies in these chapters. This is important, because assessment writing involves technical aspects and can easily get mired in jargon. The authors of the Personological, Psychodynamic, and Empirical chapters avoid this pitfall admirably. They use plain language and explain their ideas in ways that are readable.

The authors of the Multivariate chapter fall prey to reifying the labels of their instrument, the NEO. They make statements like "Madeline is average in Neuroticism," or apply to her various labels from the test: she is an "Upbeat Optimist," a "Creative Interactor," or "Cold-Blooded." They never sample her behavior directly, and so they must rely on the subject's self-descriptions which can only come from her own perspective. They have her paramour also complete the NEO about the subject, but when there are discrepancies in the ratings between the two subjects, the examiners manage the discordances with the dubious practice of averaging the results rather than addressing the differences. Potentially important information is thus glossed over and lost.

The authors of the Psychodynamic Assessment do an especially impressive job of description and of handling discrepancies. They find fascinating ways of interpreting the discordant data when they emerge. They also integrate behavioral observations and examiner reactions into the assessment in ways that are convincing and engaging. The Empirical Assessment is also impressive; fortunately for the examiner, the subject's MMPI was valid. The Personological Assessment is essentially a detailed clinical interview, and as such, it does not provide test data but interview statements. Five self-report measures are included in this assessment, as is a TAT, but the author focuses primarily on the interview material.

The weakest chapter from a writing perspective is the Interpersonal Assessment. The chapter includes many difficult-to-discern graphs and is highly theory-bound. The writing style is academ-ese: highly technical terms and knotted sentences abound. The authors coin new words, and unnecessarily so-- they insist on using the word "inattending" instead of ignoring, denying, or not recognizing. In their words, "the approach we take to this assessment can best be described as application, at the level of the individual case, of a nomological net developed from the transactional evolution of interpersonal personality theory and a highly generative structural model, the interpersonal complex." The Huh? factor doesn't end there.

The book overall is written with a great deal of summarizing, which makes for repetitious reading, but Wiggins has reason to be as enthusiastic as he is. There is so much of value in the volume. A complaint: these are not differing "paradigms" of assessment, but alternative "models" of assessment. They all share the paradigm that personality can be measured to some degree through assessment practices. An under-expressed concept in the book is that most clinical assessments would include several of these approaches rather than just one. An aggregation of objective, interview, and projective results would only strengthen the findings that even singly are demonstrated in this case to be impressive. A highly recommended source for students, instructors, and clinicians.