Psychological Testing Questions and Answers

Answer: B

The psychologist is breaking the principle of integrity.

The APA's ethical principle of integrity requires psychologists to promote accuracy, honesty and truthfulness and not to make false or misleading statements. No psychological test predicts behaviour with 100 per cent accuracy, since every test has measurement error and imperfect validity, so such a claim misrepresents the test.

Competence concerns working only within the limits of one's training. Respect for privacy concerns confidentiality. Concern for others' welfare concerns protecting the people psychologists work with. The false claim about accuracy is first of all a breach of honesty.

Answer: C

The ethical practices are (1) and (2).

Ethical codes for testing require psychologists to keep test results confidential, releasing them only to people with a legitimate right to them (1), and to obtain informed consent from test takers, explaining the purpose, nature and use of the testing before it begins (2).

Statement (3) is not an ethical principle. Test takers, including adolescents and children in a suitable form, have a right to feedback on their results, and the rule is to communicate results in a way the person can understand, not to tell adults only. So the options including (3) are wrong.

Answer: C

Popular responses on the Rorschach are always F+ responses.

A popular response is one given very frequently by people in general to a particular card, such as a bat or butterfly to Card V. Because such percepts fit the shape of the blot well and are commonly seen, they are by definition good-form (F+) responses.

They cannot be infrequent, since frequency is what makes them popular. Space responses use the white areas of the card, which popular responses usually do not. F− responses are poor-form percepts that do not fit the blot, the opposite of populars.

Answer: C

The GATB indices among those listed are (I) and (III), cognitive and perceptual.

The General Aptitude Test Battery of the US Employment Service measures nine aptitudes, which are grouped for job matching into three composites: a cognitive composite (general learning ability, verbal and numerical aptitude), a perceptual composite (spatial aptitude, form perception and clerical perception) and a psychomotor composite (motor coordination, finger and manual dexterity).

There is no behavioural index in the battery, and 'achievement potential' is not one of its composites, so every option including (II) or (IV) is wrong.

Answer: A

Item bias is studied by comparing (I) only, item difficulty across groups.

An item is biased when people from different groups who have the same level of the ability being measured have different chances of answering it correctly. Methods of detecting differential item functioning (DIF) such as Mantel-Haenszel and item response theory compare an item's difficulty or response curve across groups after matching on total score.

A difference in the two groups' average performance on the whole test (II) cannot show bias by itself, because the groups may genuinely differ in the ability. That is why 'Both' and '(II) only' are wrong, and 'Neither' ignores the standard method.

Answer: A

The item to add first is the one with P = 0.12.

The difficulty index P of an item is the proportion of test takers who answer it correctly, so the lower the P value, the harder the item. An item answered correctly by only 12 per cent of examinees is the hardest of the four and does most to raise the overall difficulty of the test.

P = 0.20 is the next hardest, P = 0.45 is of moderate difficulty, and P = 0.87 is an easy item that would make the test easier. The common mistake is reading P as a difficulty score where higher means harder.

Answer: A

On the official key the answer is (I) only: temporal stability.

Test-retest reliability gives the same test twice to the same group and correlates the two sets of scores. Because the items are identical, the test's content cannot contribute error, and what is left is change over the interval: the standard textbook classification (Anastasi, Kaplan and Saccuzzo) names this error source time sampling, the stability of scores over time.

Content of the test (II) is the error source of alternate-form and split-half reliability, where different items are compared, which is why options B and C fail. Individual variation and the test administrator (III, IV) are general sources of error in any testing, not the source that defines test-retest.

What could not be confirmed: some texts also treat fluctuations in the testing session as error in a retest, so the word 'only' rests on the textbook classification by type of reliability.

Answer: A

Item characteristic curve theory is also known as latent trait theory.

Item response theory models the probability of a correct answer to an item as a function of an unobserved (latent) trait, usually written theta. The S-shaped graph of that probability against theta is the item characteristic curve, and its shape is fixed by item parameters such as difficulty, discrimination and guessing. Because everything is referred to an underlying trait that cannot be observed directly, the approach was first called latent trait theory, and also ICC theory.

The standard models assume a single trait, so 'multidimensional trait theory' is wrong. Test standardisation and construct validation are procedures used in test construction, not other names for this model.

Answer: D

The most appropriate description is a standardized measure of a sample of behaviour.

Anne Anastasi's well-known definition is that a psychological test is essentially an objective and standardized measure of a sample of behaviour. A test samples behaviour, because it can observe only a limited set of responses, and it is standardized, because administration and scoring are uniform so that scores can be compared.

'A measure of a sample of behaviour' leaves out standardization. Many tests are not self-report measures, for example ability and performance tests, and tests are not limited to conscious behaviour, since projective tests aim at material outside awareness.

Answer: A

Stanine scores are used to interpret interindividual differences.

A stanine ('standard nine') is a normalised standard score on a nine-point scale with a mean of 5 and a standard deviation of about 2. It places a person's score within the distribution of the norm group, so it tells how one individual compares with others: an interindividual comparison.

Stanines are not used to trace developmental change within one person over time. They are not limited to personality tests or to ability tests: they are widely used for achievement and aptitude tests as well, so the two options with 'only' are wrong.