Psychological Testing and Assessment

Psychological Testing and Assessment presents students with a solid grounding in psychometrics and the world of testing and assessment. The book distinguishes itself through its logical organization, readable text, and many pedagogical aids, such as the “Meet an Assessment Professional” feature in every chapter which highlights the works of people such as Dr. Stephen Finn, architect of therapeutic assessment. Now in its eighth edition, this text has consistently won enthusiastic reviews not only for its balance of breadth and depth of coverage, but for content that brings a human face to the assessment enterprise.

Ronald Jay Cohen, Ph.D., ABPP, is a Diplomate of the American Board of Professional Psychology in Clinical Psychology, and a Diplomate of the American Board of Assessment Psychology (ABAP). He is a New York State licensed psychologist, and a scientist-practitioner and scholar-professional in the finest traditions of each of those terms. During a long and gratifying professional career in which he has published numerous journal articles and books, Dr. Cohen has had the privilege of personally working alongside some of the luminaries in the field of psychological assessment,including David Wechsler (while Cohen was a clinical psychology intern at Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital in New York City) and Doug Bray (while working as an assessor for AT&T in its Management Progress Study). After serving his clinical psychology internship at Bellevue, Dr. Cohen was appointed Senior Psychologist there, and his clinical duties entailed not only psychological assessment but the supervision and training of others in this enterprise. Subsequently, as an independent practitioner in the New York City area, Dr. Cohen taught various courses at local universities on an adjunct basis, including undergraduate and graduate courses in psychological assessment.Asked by a colleague to conduct a qualitative research study for an advertising agency,Dr. Cohen would quickly become a sought-after qualitative research consultant with a client list of major companies and organizationsamong them Paramount Pictures,Columbia Pictures, NBC Television, the Campbell Soup Company, Educational Testing Service, and the College Board. Dr. Cohens approach to qualitative research, referred to by him as dimensional qualitative research, has been emulated and written about by qualitative researchers around the world. Working as a consultant to one major company that wanted to learn more about its corporate culture, Dr. Cohen developed the Discussion of Organizational Culture (a qualitative research instrument discussed in Chapter 16). It was Dr. Cohens work in the area of qualitative assessment that led him to found the scholarly journal Psychology & Marketing, which in 2012 celebrated some 30 years of consecutive publishing with Dr. Cohen as editor-in-chief.

Mark E. Swerdlik, Ph.D., ABPP, is Professor of Psychology at Illinois State University,where he has taught the undergraduate psychological measurement course, conducted professional seminars addressing legal/ethical issues in assessment, and supervised practicum students in assessment. He has served as an editorial board member of several journals, written test reviews for several journals, reviewed test-scoring software for a major test publisher, and served as a reviewer for the Mental Measurements Yearbook.In various professional capacities, he has participated in the standardization of many psychological tests, including, for example, the WISC-R, the WISC-III, the Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children (K-ABC), the Stanford-Binet IV, the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT), the Kaufman Test of Educational Achievement, the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scale, the Psychological Processing Checklist (PPC), and the Psychological Processing Checklist-Revised (PPC-R). As a licensed clinical psychologist,a nationally certified school psychologist, independent practitioner, and consultant,Dr. Swerdlik administers and interprets psychological tests, and conducts seminars to train fellow professionals in proper test administration, scoring, and interpretation procedures. He has also served as a program evaluator for many programs, a partial listing of which would include the Heart of Illinois Low Incidence Association (HILA),the Autism/Pervasive Developmental Delays Training and Technical Assistance Project, and the Illinois National Guard Statewide Reintegration Program for Combat Veterans(for veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, from 2006 to the present).

New to this edition is Edward Sturman, Ph.D., an Associate Professor of Psychology at the State University of New York, Plattsburgh. Dr. Sturman is the co-coordinator of the Psychology program at the Queensbury branch campus, where he has taught many courses, including a seminar in Psychological Assessment. Dr. Sturman has developed several psychological tests, including the Mood Disorders Insight Scale (MDIS) and the Involuntary Subordination Questionnaire (ISQ), which have been linked to the course and outcome of mood disorders. He has also conducted research into the assessment of competency and developed a new method to evaluate the reliability of tests. His research findings have been published in well-regarded psychological journals and presented at major psychological conferences. Prior to his current teaching position, Dr. Sturman worked at the Self-Management Group as a consultant investigating the link between personality and performance in competitive environments, including sales and management positions at large corporations. His current research is primarily focused on the vulnerability of various personality styles to mental disorder as well as the evolutionary underpinnings of mental disorder.Dr. Sturman thanks his students, and in particular, Michelle Mann-Saumier, KylieMcKeighan, Joyalina David, Jeff Merrigan, and Jennifer Burch Dean for their work on his contribution to this book.