An Empiricist Approach of Assessing Psychological Status of Clients Undergoing Psychotherapy: Applying the Trauma Screening Questionnaire

Abstract

The psycho-technical assessment of people's psychological evolution in therapy context based on score utterances remains problematic. The notion of direct product order allows rigorously defining the concepts of homogeneous and heterogeneous evolution, which in turn makes it possible to specify the domain of comparative evaluation validities. Two groups of participants who experienced the earthquake of January 12, 2010 in Haiti were assessed in test-retest using the TSQ, with one group having received psychological treatment (NA=169) and the other none (NB=203). A heterogeneous evolution was observed in roughly 40% of cases, regardless of the group. The proportion of improved corrected cases was 79.41% for group A versus 37.28% for group B (z=6.29, p <0.001). These results show that incomparability occurs in significantly high proportions. Therefore, practitioners must be aware that referring to an individuals' psychological state in terms of improving or deteriorating based only on score can be, at best, vague, and, at worst, misleading. The presented method, direct product order, has proved best to assess psychological status of patients and clients, psychotherapy or even psychopharmacotherapy.