Psychological Assessment

The Process of Developing a Psychological Measure

1. Introduction

Psychological tests are used by counsellors, therapists and other professionals to quantify and measure behaviour of individuals or groups.

According to Dr Price and Dr Oswald of California State University (http://psych.csufresno.edu/psy144), psychological constructs like self-esteem, honesty and other personality traits cannot be measured directly so these abstracts have to be defined in terms of measurements that can be observed directly, for example, to measure self-esteem, one could ask a person to say how strongly he/she agrees on a series of statements, obviously one would not be measuring self-esteem but a person’s reaction to a set of questions. These answers are averaged into a score the scores are used to predict future behaviour of the people tested. Types of tests include intelligence, achievement or aptitude, occupational, neuropsychological and personality tests.

Designing a psychological test does not happen overnight, it can take up to five years to develop a psychological assessment measure from start to finish. According to Foxcroft (2009) (cited in Foxcroft & Roodt, 2009), the development of a psychological measure is done in phases and each phase has certain steps but the process is dynamic and one sometimes has to go back to a previous phase while deciding on aspects during further phases.

2. Steps in developing a test

The following is a discussion on the phases and steps of the development of a psychological measure according to Cheryl Foxcroft and Gert Roodt (2009).

2.1 Planning Phase

Foxcroft states that the importance of this phase is often underestimated and that a lot more time is needed in the planning phase especially when developing tests for multicultural and multilingual use.

3.1.1 Specifying the aim of the measure

When you are developing a test the following aims have to be specified very clearly:

*...