Warnings the Main Reason Brief

¶ … Warnings

The main reason brief assessments are used in psychological evaluations is financial: in an era of managed care, gaining a relatively swift overview of a patient's main complaints is deemed essential. Managed care organizations also emphasize a symptom and disease-focused treatment approach, hence the popularity of the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI). However, some research studies on brief assessments do support their efficacy in the sense that they do not seem to be significantly less effective than other forms of assessment, when used within their self-identified narrow parameters (Groth-Marnat 2009, p.579).

Brief assessments are supposed to be directly relevant to treatment planning and outcome assessment, as opposed to less clearly-defined and purposeful assessments such as the MMPI or the Rorschach (Groth-Marnat 2009, p.580). The Beck can be used to evaluate the severity of a patient's depression and to set a baseline to see if a particular course of treatment is proving to be helpful in alleviating the patient's symptoms. The BDI can also be useful for research purposes, to demonstrate the efficacy of a particular type of therapy or drug for depression. The BDI has population-specific versions for the elderly and adolescents to make the assessment more sensitive to demographic differences.

Regarding the criticism that brief assessments are 'blunt' instruments of assessment and unnecessary reductive, such an argument could be conceivably made against all psychological inventories, not just brief assessments. Yet the Beck seems to presuppose that depression is the patient's complaint, and may cause a clinician to overlook other sources for the patient's problem that could be masked as depression, such as a personality disorder, for example.

Another brief assessment, the SCL-90-R is designed to quickly assess a client's symptoms with a list of 90 symptoms the examinee is supposed to rate for their severity from 0-4. The SCL-90-R could be used in an emergency room when confronted with a patient with a psychological complaint as well as in a clinical setting. It measures several common psychological complaints, ranging from depression to anxiety to psychosis (Groth-Marnat 2009, pp.585-586). The test has the advantage of being normed on four specific groups: psychiatric outpatients, psychiatric nonpatients, psychiatric inpatients, and nonpatient adolescents (Groth-Marnat 2009, p.580). The patient's individual test results can be compared with the results of the most appropriate normative group. The test is easily and quickly scored, given its multiple-choice format. Test reliability is judged as 'good' although the test data is descriptive rather than interpretive by nature.

The SCL-90-R, in contrast to the Beck, is much more comprehensive and sweeping in nature. It measures a variety of complaints, rather than has the focused nature that is supposed to be the profile of a typical 'brief' assessment. The STAI State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) is more typical of a 'brief' assessment in that it focuses on anxiety, and seeks to identify specific mental states associated with anxiety, such as generalized anxiety, anxiety specific to a situation, and depression that can be masked as anxiety (Groth-Marnat 2009, p.590).