Validity vs motivation

Something that stuck with me when thinking about topics for this blog was the shear length of some of the test mentioned in class. I was surprised by the scope of topics covered by the WAIS, like the verbal comprehension and the perceptual reasoning scale. Each scale had numerous tests that could be used to analyze a persons’ intelligence in that field.

Although the amount of tests and trials was good to increase validity I can’t help but think that it must be trying for a client. A balance between test validity and the participant’s motivation seems like a hard thing to control. How much does motivation impact the validity of the results? If the person you’re testing is completely done with the whole process and just wants to quicken the end, they might give half-assed or wrong answers simply to speed up the process.

Keeping a client focused after 3 or so hours of concentration is a tough job and must be stressful on the examiner, especially if the client might not be fully invested in the process. You have to try and keep clients motivation up but that must be hard as you can’t really offer them cookies as incentive for a job well done (would be cool if you could). You want your test to be valid so it needs to be lengthy but if it’s too long the client might get bored or frustrated and fudge some answer, making the test invalid. Keeping them on task and focused seems like it would be a whole different challenge.

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