Acceptance of Oral and Written Psychological Reports by Clients

Abstract

After long neglect ( 3 ) current interest in clinical assessment is emerging with a new social-psychological focus on interactions of client and examiner and variables which influence the effectiveness of direct communication of assessment results to clients ( 2 ) . The present research is one of a series of studies which has examined empirically the effects of report form on client reactions to feedback information (1, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9 ) . Undergraduates (31 males and 31 females) completed Form A of Jackson's Personality Research Form (6 ) during a regular dass period. Two weeks after the initial test administration, half of the subjects were individually given a written report summarizing their own test data. The remining subjects received their test results orally in individual test sessions. The personality descriptions in all reports were drawn from the interpretive Guide for the test. Immediately afterwards subjects indicated their preference for oral or written reports and their views on the accuracy of test interpretations by completing a series of six open-ended questions. For purposes of statistical analysis six advanced graduate students were asked to sort the answers to these open-ended questions into discrete categories for preference and accuracy. Subjects significantly preferred oral to written feedback ( x 2 = 8.79, #J < .05, 1 d f ) . However, this preference appeared to have little or no effect on subjects' assessment of the accuraq of oral vs written psychological reports (X .18, 1 d f ) . The present results support the view that content variables are of greater importance for judgments of accuracy than the form of psychological reports whose influence may be largely restricted to matters of preference (9).