Talk:Psychological evaluation

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This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): J-Marie B.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 07:25, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Comment

In the section about situations requiring a psychological evaluation, I think it should be added that it may be required to determine whether someone who is seeking disability is disabled or not. I am not editing the page because I have no source for this other than personal experience. Perhaps someone could find a source, and make the edit.

Perhaps "...lead to a diagnosis..." would be a more appropriate wording than "...result in a diagnosis...".

Psychological evaluation and psychological assessment

An editor recently removed "or psychological assessment" from the article's first sentence (diff). I agree with the deletion, although for a different reason. The editor explained their edit with "the terms are not equivalent." I disagree, but the deletion was warranted to avoid repetitive language, viz., "... psychological assessment is a method to assess ...."

I thought about adding a brief section discussing the two terms, but instead I opted for an explanatory note (diff):

The phrases "psychological evaluation" and "psychological assessment" seem to be used interchangeably. For example, the American Psychological Association (APA) Dictionary does not define "psychological evaluation", but it defines "psychological assessment" as "the gathering and integration of data to evaluate a person’s behavior, abilities, and other characteristics, particularly for the purposes of making a diagnosis or treatment recommendation" (emphasis added). An article on the APA website titled, "Understanding psychological testing and assessment", explains: "Psychological evaluations serve the same purpose [as medical tests]. Psychologists use tests and other assessment tools to measure and observe a patient’s behavior to arrive at a diagnosis and guide treatment" (emphasis added).

I included two references, omitted in the quote above. Also note that, based on Google searches, "psychological evaluation" is more common in the United States, whereas "psychological assessment" is used more often in other English-speaking countries like Canada and the United Kingdom. Furthermore, since about 1980, a search of books reveals that "psychological assessment" appears more than twice as often as "psychological evaluation".

Mark D Worthen PsyD (talk) [he/him] 05:33, 13 November 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the comment. I certainly don't want to nitpick on this issue. I think nuanced differences probably reflect differences in training. I was taught that assessment includes gathering of data (including but not limited to test data), whereas evaluation includes judgments (such as diagnosis) that could arise from assessment. That's why my reports are titled "Psychological Evaluation" instead of "Psychological Assessment", because diagnoses are included in the evaluation, but I have no diagnosis during the assessment. Sundayclose (talk) 15:53, 13 November 2022 (UTC)

@Sundayclose That is my understanding too, but I could not find a reliable source that said so. There are probably such sources out there, yet I quickly found reliable sources using the terms as if they are synonymous. Thus, our understanding of the distinction is apparently not as universal as I had assumed. Mark D Worthen PsyD (talk) [he/him] 11:37, 15 November 2022 (UTC)

@Markworthen: I think for the purposes of a general encyclopedia it doesn't really matter. Maybe to those of us who have spent years (or decades) using the terms such a distinction might have meaning, but Wikipedia is for general readership. I like your solution of giving a fuller explanation in a footnote. Thanks for the discussion. Sundayclose (talk) 13:46, 15 November 2022 (UTC)