Abstract
Psychological Assessment can be defined as a complex procedure of information collection, analysis and processing. Formal Psychological Assessment (FPA) tries to improve this procedure by providing a formal framework to build assessment tools. In this paper, FPA is applied to depression. Seven questionnaires widely used for the self-evaluation of depression were selected. Diagnostic criteria for major depressive disorder were derived from the DSM-5, literature and Seligman’s and Beck’s theories. A Boolean matrix was built, including 266 items from the questionnaires in the rows and 20 selected attributes, obtained through diagnostic criteria decomposition, in the columns. In the matrix, a 1 in a cell meant that the corresponding item investigated the specific attribute. It was thus possible to analyze the relationships between items and attributes and among items. While none of the considered questionnaires could alone cover all the criteria for the evaluation of depressive symptoms, we observed that a set of 30 items contained the same information that was obtained redundantly with 266 items. Another result highlighted by the matrix regards the relations among items. FPA allows in-depth analysis of currently used questionnaires based on the presence/absence of clinical elements. FPA allows for going beyond the mere score by differentiating the patients according to symptomatology. Furthermore, it allows for computerized-adaptive assessment.
Highlights
The increase of depression in the last few years is a debated topic [1,2,3,4,5]
The Formal Psychological Assessment (FPA) details the relations between objects and attributes
FPA allows for the pinpointing of the relations among sets of items and attributes by analyzing the presence or absence of diagnostic criteria in the items
Summary
The increase of depression in the last few years is a debated topic [1,2,3,4,5]. Some authors argue that, nowadays, depressive disorders with bipolar disorder are the most common type of disease in the world, though often unrecognized and inadequately treated [2,3,4]. At the present time, the only ways the clinician has to account for the specific information endorsed by the pattern are: i) to read all the items the patient has answered affirmatively, and from them, try to deduce his/her clinical situation (it is noteworthy that this solution is applicable only when the questionnaire counts a low number of items, and that this operation cannot be carried out when tolls like the MMPI-2 are administered); and ii) to further investigate these issue through psychological interview. The lattice is a deterministic representation of the prerequisite relation among the items of the domain It is evident how a completely deterministic approach is inadequate for assessment in clinical practice for two main reasons: first, not all clinical states have the same probability of occurring; second, in self-report tools, problems with patient insight or with item wording may prevent a perfect correspondence between the observed response pattern and the actual clinical condition of the patient. The present paper aims to describe a practical application of FPA to illustrate procedural issues, discuss the advantages of the approach, and show its potential for psychological assessment in this case, relating to depression
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