After recently reading a very interesting article, I’ve decided to blog about the use of psychological testing in child custody cases. I’ll explain the importance of mental health professionals in child custody cases, then go on to describe a possible limitation to employing traditional psychological tests and conclude with some examples of the psychological tests used and a brief discussion. First, why is this important? Well, decisions in child custody cases are among the most difficult because they involve numerous important issues. These issues include “child development, parenting behaviour, family systems, psychopathology and emotional well-being”. As a result, lawyers and judges will typically turn to mental health professionals to help them in making these decisions. The reason for including mental health professionals is “based on the assumption that mental health professionals will be able to provide valuable information about the children and parents, which, in turn, will form the basis for a more informed and better decision on the part of the legal decision maker”. In child custody cases, the mental health professionals take on the task of assessing multiple individuals. For example, the following people are examined: the mother, the father, the child or children, and step-parents. Since child custody cases are so complex, it is not surprising that mental health professionals have tried to develop instruments to assess criteria that may lead to maladaptive post-divorce adjustment.

As a result, mental health professionals use standard psychological tests because it ensures a certain level of objectivity and science. However, “although the use of standardized psychometric measures is common, the testing practices of child custody evaluators have been subject to considerable criticism”. More specifically, “traditional psychological tests used by many child custody evaluators do not address psycholegal issues directly relevant to the child custody question (e.g., parenting ability, the nature and quality of the parent-child relationship, and the willingness of each parent to facilitate a close relationship with the other parent)”. As a result, this forces the evaluator to make inferences from the construct that is assessed to determine behaviours that are relevant to child custody, specifically. This is problematic because it is quite difficult to answer questions that pertain to child custody cases by simply making inferences from the results obtained from psychology tests.

Typically, the following tests have been used in child custody cases: intelligence tests, the Thematic Apperception Test or the Children’s Apperception Test, the Rorschach Inkblot Technique, the Bender-Gestalt Visual Motor Test, the MMPI, the WAIS the Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory, the Bricklin Perceptual Scales (BPS), the Perception of Relationships Test, the Ackerman-Schoendorf Scales for Parent Evaluation of Custody (ASPECT), the Parent Awareness Skills Survey (PASS) and the Custody Quotient (CQ).

Furthermore, I’d like to connect this article to what we’ve learned in PSYC 406. The article describes a list of guidelines that are used to assess which tests should be considered in child custody cases. First, it is “recommended that adequate levels of reliability be demonstrated”. Second, “it is suggested that the test should be relevant to the legal issue at hand and that, when possible, this should be established by validation research”. Third, “to ensure generalizability from the testing stuations”. Fourth, “the examiner should consider differences between the examinee and the population with which a test was developed and/or differences between the purposes for which a test was developed and the purposes for which it is being used”. The main ideas that are embedded in the aforementioned criterion parallel the topics that were covered in lectures. Although we learned about concepts like reliability and validity in a classroom environment, it is interesting to see how important they are when applied in real world settings.

References:

Otto, R. K., Edens, J. F. and Barcus, E. H. (2000), THE USE OF PSYCHOLOGICAL TESTING IN CHILD CUSTODY EVALUATIONS. Family Court Review, 38: 312–340. doi: 10.1111/j.174-1617.2000.tb00578.x