How Should Psychological Assessment Be Considered?

February 2002 American Psychologist

Roco Fernndez-Ballesteros; Universidad Autnoma de Madrid

For the last 50 years, psychological assessment and psychological testing have been used as
equivalent terms. However, Meyer et al. (February 2001) have made a thorough distinction
between the two fields, emphasizing the main differences and presenting support for the
validity of a large set of assessment methods that constitute the basic tools for both
assessment and testing. It can be predicted that their article will be a seminal work that will
make a strong contribution to the understanding of the field and reinforce its importance
within psychology.
Nevertheless, two possible criticisms should be discussed: First, this article reduced the field
of psychological assessment to the clinical context, and second, the use of multimethods has
not been supported as part of the basic psychological assessment process that should direct
any methodological decision.
The authors state that:
Psychological testing is a relatively straightforward process wherein a
particular scale is administered to obtain a specific score. . . . In
contrast, psychological assessment is concerned with the clinician
[italics added] who takes a variety of test scores, generally obtained
from multiple test methods, and considers the data in the context of
history, referral information, and observed behavior to understand the
person being evaluated, to answer the referral questions, and then to
communicate findings to the patient, his or her significant others, and
referral sources. (Meyer et al., 2001, p. 143)
Thus, the most important differential characteristic between psychological testing and
psychological assessment concerns the simplicity or complexity of the assessment methods
used (simple or particular scale or multiple methods). In fact, for the last 30 years, I have
been defending such a conceptualization (for a review, see Fernndez-Ballesteros, 1999)
and am therefore in total agreement (as are other authors: e.g., Cohen, Swerdlik, & Phillips,
1996). However, both in this definition and throughout their article, Meyer et al. reduced
psychological assessment to just one of the possible fields of application, that is, the clinical
setting. Such an assumption cannot be supported, either from a historical point of view or
even from the methodological evidence presented in the article. I will briefly discuss both
aspects.
It is well known, and it has been noted by several authors, that the term assessment was
used for the first time in a program begun in 1943 by the U.S. Office of Strategic Services. As

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