Canadian psychologists’ test feedback training and practice: A national survey.

Psychologists play unique role among mental health professionals, one that is characterised by the development, administration, and interpretation of psychological tests (Meyer et al., 2001). Testing is an integral and multidimensional aspect of psychological practice that provides wealth of valuable information to clinicians and clients. Psychologists are also ethically obligated to share assessment results with clients whenever possible, an exchange referred to as test feedback (TFB). The Canadian Code of Ethics for Psychologists (Canadian Psychological Association [CPA], 2000) states that psychologists are to suitable information about the results of assessments, evaluations, or research findings to the persons involved, if appropriate and if asked. This information would be communicated in understandable language. The code also states that psychologists are to Protect the skills, knowledge, and interpretations of psychology from being misused, used incompetently, or made useless by others (Section III.15; Section IV.11, CPA, 2000).TFB is key element in collaborative, humanistically oriented approaches to assessment, such as therapeutic assessment (TA). TA is an empirically based assessment model developed by SteRyan phen Finn and is described as a semi-structured form of collaborative assessment that uses psychological testing as the centerpiece of brief therapy (Finn & Tonsager, 2002, p. 10). Critical aspects of TA include: (a) helping clients to generate personally relevant questions they would like addressed through the assessment, (b) collecting relevant background information pertaining to the clients' questions, (c) exploring past testing-related hurts, (d) involving clients as active agents throughout the assessment process, including collaboratively discussing test results in order to address their initial questions (Finn, 1996, 2007).Research results suggest the TA model offers many positive effects for children, adolescents, adults, and couples presenting with variety of problems. These include decreased client symptomatology, improved treatment alliance, heightened compliance with treatment recommendations, enhanced self-esteem and increased levels of hope, with global composite effect sizes hovering around .40 (Ackerman, Hilsenroth, Baity, & Blagys, 2000; Hanson, Claiborn, & Kerr, 1997; Hilsenroth, Peters, & Ackerman, 2004; Meyer et al., 2001; Ougrin, Zundel, Ng, Habel, & Latif, 2013; Poston & Hanson, 2010). There is also strong evidence that clients experience considerable benefits from receiving TFB in general (Allen, Montgomery, Tubman, Frazier, & Escovar, 2003; Newman & Greenway, 1997; Poston & Hanson, 2010). In light of the many benefits TFB offers to consumers of psychological testing, it is important to study Canadian psychologists' assessment and TFB practices. It is also important to study how they learned to do so. Finally, it is important to uncover the reasons why some Canadian psychologists might not be regularly offering TFB to clients.In an American study examining psychologists' TFB training and practice, Curry and Hanson (2010) found that 91.7% of respondents reported providing TFB to clients at least sometimes, 35% reported doing so all of the time, and 2.8% reported never providing TFB. Recently graduated clinical psychologists reported providing TFB to clients more consistently than clinical psychologists who earned their degrees earlier, although no such trend was found among school and counselling psychologists. Almost one third of respondents indicated predoctoral training was minimally helpful in learning to provide TFB. However, this rating of the helpfulness of predoctoral training did not coincide with TFB utilization in practice. Ratings of postdoctoral training helpfulness were positively correlated with providing TFB. The primary method of learning indicated by respondents consistently providing TFB was through trial-and-error and the most common reason for not providing TFB was conducting assessments in forensic settings. …

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