The Principles and Practice of Psychological Assessement

By Alwyn Moerdyk

Assessment is an important part of any psychologist's role and the outcome can have consequences, positive and negative, for the person being assessed. The principles and practice of psychological assessment is a guide to drawing up, administering and interpreting assessment procedures, and judging whether the techniques used are theoretically and procedurally sound. It also takes a special look at assessment from an organisational perspective, because although many of the technical and scientific issues with respect to psychological assessment are common to all areas of applied psychology, there are numerous issues and applications that are unique to the organisational context. The principles and practice of psychological assessment is more of a how to than a critical text, but includes some background information and in-depth theorising for more problematic issues. A glossary of terms and a unique cognitive map of psychological tests are provided. Changes in this second edition include two new chapters, one on Assessing integrity (which previously formed part of the chapter on personality) and a new chapter on Assessment in cross-cultural contexts, where the theoretical and practical problems associated with assessing people in their non-native language are described and ways of addressing these are put forward. Throughout the text, references and examples have been updated and issues raised in recent texts have been addressed. Contents include the following: Properties of a good measuring technique; ways of categorising the observation process; techniques used in measurement; errors inherent in the assessment process; combining and interpreting results; fairness, bias and discrimination; assessing cross-culturally; designing and locating appropriate assessment centre exercises; assessing integrity. The principles and practice of psychological assessment is aimed at undergraduate and honours students of psychology and industrial psychology, as well as at practitioners.