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20 - Performance-Based Techniques

from Part II - Specific Clinical Assessment Methods

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 December 2019

By
Gregory J. Meyer  and
Joni L. Mihura
Edited by
Martin Sellbom  and
Julie A. Suhr
Martin Sellbom
Affiliation:
University of Otago, New Zealand
Julie A. Suhr
Affiliation:
Ohio University
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Summary

This chapter reviews the performance-based techniques most commonly used by clinical psychologists. These include the Rorschach inkblot task, two picture story tasks (the Thematic Apperception Test and Adult Attachment Projective), two sentence stem tasks (the Rotter Incomplete Sentences Blank and Washington University Sentence Completion Test), and two types of prompted drawing tasks (variations of human figure drawings and the Wartegg Drawing Completion Test). We review how each measure is used as well as evidence for their reliability, validity, and normative standards. In order to facilitate optimal use of these measures in multimethod clinical assessment, we also contextualize them as typical performance methods that help illustrate what a person is prone to do in standardized contexts when given wide latitude to perform and differentiate them from maximum performance methods of ability that illustrate what a person can do when performing their best at a task with clear guidelines for success, or self- and informant-reported methods that indicate what a person is like based on linguistically mediated introspective recall.

Keywords

typical performance tasksRorschachthematic apperceptionincomplete sentencesprompted drawingmultimethod assessment
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Clinical Assessment and Diagnosis , pp. 278 - 290
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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