Communicating the results of psychological testing to adolescents: When, how and why?

Abstract

The traditional process of psychological assessment involves an approach in which the diagnostician is focused on gathering relevant information about the subject using a standard test battery, which aims to assess key aspects of the subject's functioning. Modern tendencies indicate that there is a potentially constructive modification of the paradigm of work of a clinical psychologist/psychotherapist employed in a health institution with the daily task of psychodiagnostic assessment. Potential change of the way of working is actually moving the approach from "information-oriented" to "change-oriented" whose essential premise is that the clinical psychologist uses the test situation and the tests as a situation during the psychodiagnostic application of instruments in which the respondent can gain new psychological insights. Events that occur "Here and now" in the test situation and the use of test material as a "provocateur" of maladaptive mechanisms of feelings, opinions and behaviour can lead to therapeutic change. In this approach some elements of the therapeutic-collaborative approach can be used during the psychodiagnostic process, with special reference to the specifics of the adolescent population.