ABSTRACT
A clinician has several options in obtaining objective and valid clinical eval uations. Precision and accuracy may be avoided and impressionistic reactions and “gut feelings” can be relied on; some clinicians are able to do competent clinical work with this approach. Or a clinician can spend considerable time and care in the diagnostic and therapeutic evaluation of children and adults with the goal of assessing accurately and precisely the magnitude of diverse psychopathological processes within patients at different times. Another approach is to use various observer psychiatric rating scales (e.g., the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale, the Hamilton Anxiety or Depression Rating scales) or various self-report measures (e.g., adjective checklists). Although such measures are widely used in many research projects, their use carries with them a false sense of security, because quite often no interrater reliability tests are done with the rating scales, the assumption apparently being that anybody can follow the instructions for
158 7. CONTENT ANALYSIS BY COMPUTER
rating and that no measurement errors are likely to occur. With rating scales, however, raters vary widely on how much of the range of ratings they use with the same subjects, and some raters characteristically select the lower range of the ratings whereas others habitually chose the higher range of the ratings. And with regard to self-report measures, although it is true that the self-rating comes directly from the individual being evaluated, the assumption is that self-raters are all in good and equivalent contact with themselves and are not likely to be falsifying, consciously or unconsciously, their self-evaluations. These kinds of measurement errors in observer rating scales and self-report scales, usually disre garded by researchers and clinicians, are minimized in the measurement method of content analysis of verbal behavior. The subject being rated is usually not aware what speech content or form is being analyzed and has difficulty covering up even if he or she has some notions about such matters. Furthermore, the unstructured approach customarily used to elicit speech avoids the questionnaire or “prosecuting attorney” method, and allows the subject to elaborate and use free will to the extent desired by the self on choice of topics to verbalize. Emotions, self-reflections, doubts, and defensive maneuvers are recorded, and these all contribute to the content analysis scores eventually calculated. The content analysis approach to the measurement of psychological dimensions in cludes the strengths of both the self-report approach and the observer rating scale approach, and minimizes the weaknesses of both in terms of measurement errors.
