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Du Bois (1970) pointed out, this new assessment program represented an improvement on
previous psychological testing:
Instead of measuring rather limited aspects of behavior, as had been the case with most
psychometric and clinical devices up to that time, a program was designed to describe the
way the individual was able to act in a wide variety of situations (p. 110). Subsequently,
assessment has been used to link all fields of psychology, becoming a generic term used in
the clinical, educational, industrial, organizational, forensic, environmental, and other
applied fields when decisions (classification, prediction, selection, counseling, intervention,
or evaluation) about subjects must be made on the basis of a set of observations through
tests or other methods, techniques, or procedures. Moreover, when Meyer et al. (2001)
reviewed assessment methods from the point of view of validity, they selected instruments
mainly from the clinical field but also from educational or work assessment contexts.
In sum, psychological assessment is a generic term embracing a broad scientific and
professional field that covers all applied contexts involving decisions about the individual
based on tests and other methods or assessment procedures or, in the words of Meyer et
al., on formal assessment (Meyer et al., 2001, p. 128). Meyer et al. (2001) also identified
multimethod assessment as one of the most important characteristics of psychological
assessment.
Certainly, the use of multimethods is a guarantee in psychological assessment, as the only
means of triangulating target constructs. At the same time, though, assessment methods
(tests, indicators, measures, questions, or any kind of observation) constitute the way of
operationalizing a given variable. This variable is selected because it forms part of a
prediction based on a given hypothesis made by the assessor about the case. In other
words, assessment through multimethods is one of the steps of a complex assessment
process: Without a previous case analysis and without selecting target and other relevant
variables included in the hypothesis, the use of a test battery (with all the valid and reliable
data-collection procedures) may lack coherence or may even be pointless. This process
cannot be reduced to clinical reasoning, but it is common to other applied fields because it
is a universal tool in science. Meyer et al. were right when they proposed that much more
attention should be paid to the assessor than to tests. Tests should be developed on the
basis of standards, but the assessor is the most important instrumentas the person
leading the assessment process and his or her behavior is guided not only by ethical but
also by scientific principles. Concern about the assessor and his or her epistemic (cognitive)
and scientific activity during the assessment process moved the European Association of
Psychological Assessment to set up a task force for developing Guidelines for the
Assessment Process (GAP). These guidelines, based on substantial research on the
assessment process, were recently published as a proposal for discussion (FernndezBallesteros et al., 2001). The GAP may prove useful as a guide to assessment and as a
guarantee that the assessor has behaved according to scientific criteria vis--vis the client,
the patient, and other relevant stakeholders.
REFERENCES
Cohen, R. J., Swerdlik, M. E., & Phillips, S. M. (1996). Psychological testing and assessment:
An introduction to tests and measurement (3rd ed.). Mountain View, CA: Mayfield.
DuBois, P. H. (1970). A history of psychological testing. Boston: Allyn & Bacon.
Fernndez-Ballesteros, R. (1999). Psychological assessment: Future challenges and
progresses. European Psychologist, 4, 248292.
Fernndez-Ballesteros, R., De Bruyn, E. E., Godoy, A., Hornke, L. F., Ter Laak, J., Vizcarro, C.,
Westhoff, W., Westmeyer, H., & Zaccagnini, J. L. (2001). Guidelines for the Assessment
Process (GAP): A proposal for discussion. European Journal of Psychological Assessment,
17, 187200.
Meyer, G. J., Finn, S. E., Eyde, L. E., Kay, G. G., Moreland, K. L., Dies, R. R., Eisman, E. J.,
Kubiszyn, T. W., & Reed, G. M. (2001). Psychological testing and psychological
assessment: A review of evidence and issues. American Psychologist, 56, 128165.
Correspondence concerning this comment should be addressed to Roco FernndezBallesteros, Department of Psychobiology and Health Psychology, Faculty of Psychology,
Autonoma University of Madrid, 28049- Madrid, Spain. E-mail: r.fballesteros@uam.es