Validity Testing in Children and Adolescents

Spiegelsberger, Malin Sophie (2022) Validity Testing in Children and Adolescents. Bachelor thesis, Psychology.

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Abstract

To detect deception during psychological assessment, validity testing became a standard in adult clinical practice. When children are however performing in a noncredible fashion in clinical practice, this is difficult to intuitively detect by adults, making validity testing indispensable in paediatric clinical assessment as well. For the purpose of detecting invalid performance in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) assessment, a disorder frequently diagnosed in the paediatric population, no validity test has been validated to date. To address the issue in the adult population, an attention-based performance validity test (PVT), the Groningen Effort Test (GET), was developed by Fuermaier et al. (2016). To evaluate whether the GET can be used in younger patients as well, this study examines the utility of the GET in the paediatric population. One hundred and seventy-eight students between 8 and 17 years completed the GET, Test of Memory Malingering (TOMM), and Reliable Digit Span (RDS), which were either instructed to simulate poor effort (simulation group, n = 53) or to give full effort (control group, n = 125). The results show that children generally perform lower than adults on the GET, but that the GET seems to be a suitable validity test nevertheless when using a higher cut-off score, and that it correlates moderately with the TOMM and RDS. While the GET needs to be further validated, this study marks a first step towards implementing it as a performance validity test for attention disorders in the paediatric population. Keywords: Performance validity testing, children and adolescents, Groningen Effort Test, ADHD

Item Type:	Thesis (Bachelor)
Supervisor name:	Fuermaier, A.B.M.
Degree programme:	Psychology
Differentiation route:	None [Bachelor Psychology]
Date Deposited:	01 Jul 2022 08:49
Last Modified:	01 Jul 2022 08:49
URI:	http://gmwpublic.studenttheses.ub.rug.nl/id/eprint/676

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