The Quantitative, Statistical Approach. An
empirically based psychologist relies on data to
make clinical judgments. These data may come
from the scientific literature in clinical psychology
or from the clinician’s own observations and data
collection with the patient. For instance, if a clini-
cian believes that a child’s oppositional behavioral is
due to a desire to get attention from a withdrawing,
emotionally“flat”parent, the clinician could learn
in the scientific literature that parents’depressive
symptoms indeed longitudinally predict increases
in children’s oppositional behavior. Moreover, the
clinician may collect information on the level of
parents’depressive symptoms using a standardized
checklist, and on the child’s level of oppositional
behavior using observations, a checklist, or struc-
tured interview. Using a simple statistical approach,
it would be possible to test the clinician’s hypothesis
and present the results to parents as a way of helping
them explain one contributing factor to their child’s
escalations in oppositional behavior.
A particular caution to bear in mind, however,
is that while statistics and scientific findings may
help to understand the relationships between vari-
ablesin general, they do not offer an answer that is
equally applicable to every situation, or every per-
son. For instance, even though the research litera-
ture suggests that parents’level of childhood peer
popularity generally is associated with their child’s
level of peer popularity, this does not mean that
every child will be similar to their parents. In
other words, the empirical approach offers informa-
tion thatraises the probabilityof a certain interpreta-
tion or outcome, but it does not guarantee that this
interpretation is correct. It is very important that
empirically based clinicians use data and scientific
evidence to help inform their decisions and to
ensure that they are using well-established knowl-
edge to guide their thinking about a case. How-
ever, one must always consider factors that may
limit the applicability of data-based findings to a
single, specific individual. We do not have data
on every community, every type of diagnosis and
comorbidity, or every possible cultural factor that
may influence clinical interpretations.
The Subjective, Clinical Approach. The clinical
approach is much more subjective, experiential, and
intuitive. Here, subjective weights based on experi-
ence suffice. The emphasis is on the application of
judgment to the individual case. The classical
notion is that“clinical intuition”is not readily ame-
nable to analysis and quantification. It is a private
process in which clinicians themselves are some-
times unable to identify the cues in a patient’s test
responses or verbalizations that led them to a given
conclusion or judgment.
Once, for example, in the course of a Rorschach
administration, a patient said,“This looks like a
Christmas tree.”What did this mean? Perhaps noth-
ing. Or perhaps it indicated a career in forestry. Or
perhaps it suggested an underlying sadness or depres-
sion in a person with few friends or family with
whom to enjoy the approaching holiday season. In
this case, the last interpretation was later supported
by the patient during a discussion of his family back-
ground. The clinical student who had made the cor-
rect interpretation in a training exercise explained
her reasoning as follows:“It was near the Christmas
season; there were several references in the TAT to
remote family figures; I remembered how I always
seem to become a little sad during Christmas; it
suddenly popped into my head, and I just knew
with complete certainty that it was true—it simply
felt right!”
This example illustrates several things about
clinical interpretation. First, such interpretation
involves a sensitive capacity to integrate material.
The astute clinical psychologist pays attention to
the wide range of events that characterize the
patient’s behavior, history, other test responses,
and so on. A clinician must function a bit like the
detective who takes in everything at the scene of
the crime and then makes a series of inductive or
deductive generalizations that link these observa-
tions together. In addition, there is often a willing-
ness in the clinician to see a bit of him- or herself in
the patient—a kind of assumed similarity that
enables the clinician to utilize his or her own expe-
rience in interpreting the behavior and feelings of
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