Clinical Decision Processes and Criteria for Social Validity

Abstract

A sample of 12 clinical psychologists and 12 graduate students in clinical psychology performed an analogue task to investigate decision processes with respect to the judged salience of criteria for social validity. Six child cases were considered by all; each card contained information describing a dangerous behavior, information accompanied by an explicit normative refererence, the same information without a normative reference, or unrelated filler comments. Non-parametric analyses indicated that subjects consistently evaluated information about dangerous behavior as being more serious than any other concern; dangerousness was ranked first 94.4% of the time. Subjects did not distinguish between information with explicit normative referents and the same information without any such referents. Students and clinicians did not differ in their response to these categories of information. The results demonstrate the application of a fixed-order problem-solving method to study the clinical-decision process and suggest the importance of criteria for social validity in this sequence.