| Summary: | "In clinical settings, the ultimate value of a psychological test report is a function of its ability to guide treatment planning in meaningful ways. Psychological test data are a rich mine of potential treatment-relevant inferences. For example, test data can inform psychologists about factors that facilitate and hinder the therapeutic alliance or that affect our ability to learn in psychotherapy. Test data can help clarify what psychological forces are driving the symptoms we are witnessing, so that an accurately targeted treatment focus can be established and tailored interventions can be recommended. Too often, however, test reports fall short of such potential and thus may not be worth the investment of time, energy, and money required of the psychologist, patient, and patient's family. Such a sad truth proves truer the more the referral questions seek to help with a patient's psychological (as opposed to academic) functioning. The result is that many nontesting clinicians have come to believe that psychological testing offers little in terms of therapy guidance beyond what good clinical interviewing provides. We wrote this book to reverse such trends, by detailing an approach to testing that restores clinicians' ability to provide testing that matters to their referring colleagues. We present an approach to testing that evolved in Menninger's psychology postdoctoral training program in Topeka, Kansas, from the 1940s until its close in 2001 (when Menninger downsized and relocated to Texas). Our interest is not in transmitting outdated norms, scores, and theory from 70 years ago. Rather, our focus is on bringing to a general readership an approach to inference making and synthesizing data that, as we hope to demonstrate, remains relevant and is clinically sophisticated and disciplined. We present a way of engaging with test data and our patient that yields findings a therapist can use immediately and return to for guidance over time. In this book, we are writing to students, supervisors, and clinicians who are intrigued with the value of testing and who want to apply mastered basics of test administration, scoring, and interpretation to the next level of tackling sophisticated treatment puzzles. We address the complexity of multisourced data--scores, indices, content themes, relational process--and we demonstrate how to cross-layer such data to yield a textured clinical picture. We offer methods for exploring hypotheses, such as probing discontinuities, "testing the limits," and focused inquiry. We spell out the tools of disciplined inference making--the checks and balances of repetition and convergence of data--that keep our findings objective (i.e., factual and verifiable) without sacrificing the meaning-making and pattern-recognition capabilities unique to an experienced clinician"--Introduction. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved).
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