Finding valid and reliable ways to assess complex clinical skills within psychology is a challenge. Recently, there have been some examples of applying Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCEs) in psychology for making such assessments. The aim of this study was to examine students' and examiners' perceptions of a digital OSCE in…

Despite efforts to boost mental health treatment-seeking behaviors by combat veterans, rates have improved relatively little since 2004. Previous work suggests that trust and confidence in the mental health community may be a significant factor. This study explored how professional titles may impact trust and confidence among active-duty U.S. Army…

What do psychology doctorate programs require and prefer in their master's level applicants? Do the programs value students' graduate experiences during and postadmission? Doctoral programs' (n = 221) responses to an online survey showed that most required letters of recommendation, personal statements, Graduate Records Examination scores, and…

Counseling studies have shown that increasing experience is not always associated with better judgments. However, in such studies performance is assessed against external criteria, which may lack validity. The authors applied the Cochran-Weiss-Shanteau (CWS) index, which assesses the ability to consistently discriminate. Results showed that novice…

This study investigated raters' personality traits in relation to scores they assigned to offenders using the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R). A total of 22 participants, including graduate students and faculty members in clinical psychology programs, completed a PCL-R training session, independently scored four criminal offenders using the…

We assessed the relationship between "U.S. News and World Report" 2008 rankings of clinical psychology doctoral programs and scores earned by graduates on the Examination for Professional Practice in Psychology (EPPP). For the top 25 programs, relationship between ranking and EPPP scores was not significant, r[subscript s] = -0.28. EPPP scores…

Using generalizability theory to evaluate the reliability of child and adolescent measures enables researchers to enhance precision of measurement and consequently increase confidence in research findings. With an observer-rated measure of child self-regulation, we illustrate how multiple sources of error variance (e.g., raters, items) affect the…

The aim of this longitudinal study was to investigate differences in interests, personality, and cognitive abilities between students majoring in the six specialties of psychology at the University of Amsterdam. Results show that students at Social Psychology and Work and Organizational Psychology were on average more extraverted than students of…

Descriptions of validity results for the GRE® General Test based solely on correlation coefficients or percentage of the variance accounted for are not merely difficult to interpret, they are likely to be misinterpreted. Predictors that apparently account for a small percentage of the variance may actually be highly important from a practical…

Validation issues that arise with measures of constructs and behavior are addressed with reference to general reasons for using assessment procedures in clinical psychology. A distinction is made between the representational phase of validity assessment and the elaborative validity phase in which the meaning and utility of scores are examined.…

This article is a cross-validation of R. G. Tedeschi and L. G. Calhoun's (1996) original study of the development of the Posttraumatic Growth Inventory (PTGI). It describes several psychometric properties of scores on the PTGI in a sample of middle- to old-aged adults with a history of cardiovascular disease. The results did not support the…