This review was principally written with the advice and assistance of Dr Susan Grey, consultant clinical psychologist at the Maudsley Hospital. The book has, however, been pawed over by quite a number of psychologists. In fact both the apology to the editor for the delay in delivering the review and the summary review could well be “once you have let a clinical psychologist lay hands on this book, it is quite difficult to get it back again”.
Assessment is what psychologists do. Assessment is a broad term, not quite synonymous with psychological testing, though psychological tests are the instruments most frequently used for the study of human mental activity. It used to be quite strongly felt, by psychologists, that psychological assessment is not merely something psychologists do, but something that only psychologists should do. The fact that, from my library, a greater proportion of books about psychological testing are out on loan to social work students, to psychiatric nursing students and to doctors than are out to trainee clinical psychologists seems to indicate that they are fighting a losing battle. Lots of different professionals seem to feel that they could benefit from being able to make psychological assessments for themselves.
Psychological tests have always presented librarians with considerable problems. The most thorough printed bibliographic coverage of them is the Mental Measurements Yearbook. This gives very detailed critical analyses of individual psychological tests, though it does not contain copies of the tests themselves. In spite of its title it is by no means a yearbook – for some years, particularly in its early stages, no issue was produced, and in some more recent years there have been several supplementary sections in a year. Even this is very incomplete and often comes out several years behind the production of a new test. Once you have found details of a test, getting hold of it is a major hassle. Test manuals are not normally held in libraries and are not normally available through the British Library interlibrary lending system. The British Psychological Society (BPS) discourages this for two obvious reasons. The first is that of copyright. Like sheet music, a test of a few pages may represent a considerable amount of intellectual effort. Psychologists, like music teachers, will happily photocopy off reams of these without a thought of paying for intellectual property. The second is that of patient awareness. Most of the existing psychological tests are inevitably less effective as measures if the person being tested knows what is coming to them – has an idea of the general structure of the test or even knows the actual questions in detail. On both of these counts, again, I fear that the psychologists are fighting a losing battle. So much information is now available on the Internet. If TimeWarner and EMI cannot keep people from copying rap records without paying, I cannot imagine that the BPS is going to be able to stop psychologists from scanning, transferring and downloading a few pages of questionnaires. I must admit that every time I look for test material on the Net I end up on yet another Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) Web site, but this is probably just a result of my incompetent searching technique. Other people seem to be able to get endless quantities of test material. The issue of the informed patient is one which all clinicians are having to face, just as educational assessors are having to face up to the carefully coached SATS student. I cannot see what the answer to this is, and one of the few criticisms I would make of this book is that it does not seem to me to look into this problem properly.
The book consists of about 250 entries of about four or five closely packed pages each, by a whole array of psychologists, including some very distinguished names. Each entry includes a general conceptual and methodological overview, a section describing relevant tests and other assessment devices, a bibliography and some cross‐references. It does not of course contain the actual tests themselves. The bibliographic references only appear to list printed material – even the MMPI entry does not mention its Web sites. There is a useful discussion of some of the practical problems of carrying out testing on the Internet, though even there all the references are to print sources, but nothing very much about Web‐based information resources on testing.
The arrangement is strictly alphabetical, not following American Psychological Association PSYCInfo subject headings, or any other set standards as far as I can see, with the obvious resulting problems of collating related material. Thus, for example, we looked up Bias in Psychological Testing, to find nothing. There are, however, excellent entries on Assessor’s Bias, on Item Bias, on Cross‐Cultural Assessment, etc., which between them cover the subject very well. Apart from this, none of my colleagues could suggest any serious criticisms of the book.
Much of the information is closely packed and uses the professional vocabulary of scientific psychology. This might limit its value to the public library, but any academic or clinical library catering for applied psychologists or other professionals who think they need to use the techniques of psychological assessment would benefit from considering this book for its reference collection.
