interests below average. Why do you think this is the case?”),
avoid a highly specialized language in explanations, technical terms
that could be unknown or wrongly / vaguely perceived by the client,
have an attitude of well-meaning neutrality and not “beautify” the
results at certain subtests: some subjects may be astonished by the
capacity of the test and of the counsellor to reveal very personal things
in their life or may be offended by certain failures (“The difficulty and
the discomfort of interpreting low performance or negative results is
the problem of the counsellor and not of the client” (Tinsley and
Bradley, 1986),
be aware of the client’s attitude towards the “ability” of the
psychological tests to “solve” personal issues, support them so that the
clients’ expectations are realistic (for instance the client may have an
exaggerated faith in the test to provide miraculous results or solutions;
the counsellor may encounter scepticism or negativity due to
difficulties in introspection or as a defence mechanism, etc.).Practice has proved that in career counselling, guidance and information the clients
request and accept a comprehensive approach to their problems and do not focus on
choosing an occupation. This makes counsellors admit the fact – which is natural, in fact
- that people consider the different roles they perform simultaneously and/or alternatively
throughout their lives to make up a continuum they get involved in completely, with their
entire being and all aspects of their personality. For these reasons, the counsellors must
understand the intra-personal interactions triggered by performing various roles by an
individual in a concrete life situation.
Technical, basic information accompanying any quality psychological test refers to:
- reliability: lack of measurement errors in psychological evaluation, assessed
by the internal consistency of the test and stability in time of the scores
obtained when the test is re-applied; the reliability coefficient (which in most
quality tests ranges between 0.80-0.90) is estimated through:
internal consistency of the instrument, resulting from a statistical
calculus of correlation and assessed to be high if all tasks / items of
the test prove to measure the same psychological variable; the check
can also be performed by applying test halves and calculating the
correlation coefficients of the scores of the two halves of the test,
stability in time of the performance obtained by the client, which
implies testing-retesting after a certain interval (the two halves must
contain the same number of items and a similar degree of difficulty,
and the selection can be performed by selecting the items numbered