Issue:
Pachet Assessment and Rehabilitation Services Inc. is an independent psychological practice with clients referred from a variety of referral sources including individuals referred from WCB-Alberta for psychological and neuropsychological assessment. Injured workers presenting with traumatic psychological injuries, head injuries and pain are often referred for comprehensive psychological and/or neuropsychological assessments to clarify diagnosis and provide treatment recommendations. An essential component of any psychological evaluation is validity assessment. There are many reasons why individuals may fail to put forth adequate effort on testing and/or engage in over or under-reporting of symptoms. To address this issue comprehensive self-report measures include indicators of over-reporting that can be used to assess the validity of the respondent’s self-report. Accurate assessment is essential for appropriate diagnosis and treatment. Inaccurate diagnosis and unnecessary treatments can have negative consequences and prolong recovery. It is important that indicators of over-reporting on self-report measures accurately detect invalid profiles. Over the course of clinical practice, cases of discrepant validity indices between different measures have been identified, which raises concerns for the interpretation of the assessment as a whole.
Objectives:
This study looks to investigate these instances by comparing the Battery for Health Improvement Second Edition (BHI-2) validity indices with those of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory Second Edition Restructured Form (MMPI-2-RF) and Green’s Word Memory Test (WMT) as these measures are current standards in validity assessment. This study will investigate the frequency of incongruent validity indices based on interpretation as recommended in test manuals. It will also investigate the performance of BHI-2 validity indices overall and whether alternative cut-off scores should be considered. Lastly, we will investigate whether particular demographic groups, considering age, level of education, and gender are more likely to have discrepant validity indices than others. The study will utilize a retrospective chart review methodology.
Anticipated Results:
The overall goal of this project is to improve the accuracy and validity of psychological and neuropsychological assessment practices for injured workers with particular generalizability to injured workers in Alberta.
Investigators:
Dr. Arlin Pachet
