Clinical and Personality Assessment: An Essay in the Honor of Scott O. Lilienfeld

Abstract

This chapter was written in honor of the late Professor Scott O. Lilienfeld, who contributed substantially and impressively to the field of clinical personality assessment. We provide an overview of this field as well as a discussion of personality scale construction and evaluation. More specifically, we review the history of personality assessment including a brief overview of Sir Francis Galton’s work which set the stage for modern psychometrics. We further review contemporary personality assessment principles, which typically focus on the assessment of psychological constructs from either typological (e.g., categorical diagnosis) or dimensional, individual differences perspectives. We describe numerous potential sources of information should be considered in assessment practice, with a particular focus on evidence-based assessment principles. The second part of this chapter covers scale construction and evaluation. In terms of the former, we detail one deductive approach that places construct validity at the center of emphasis originally championed by Loevinger, and more recently by Clark and Watson, and a second more inductive approach that allows for the elaboration of theoretical constructs through scale construction; the latter was favored by Scott Lilienfeld throughout his career. We also discuss psychometric principles of reliability, internal structure, and validity, ending with examples derived from Lilienfeld’s published work.