Studying the Clinician: Judgment Research and Psychological Assessment (Hardcover)

by Howard N. Garb (Author)
Key Phrases: covariation misestimation, more valid ratings, individual differences among clinicians, African American, Multiple Scatter, United States (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Mental health professionals make reliable and valid judgements for some tasks, but not for others. What are the cultural and cognitive biases that lead to inaccuracy? How can clinicians learn to recognize and manage the blind spots that lead to faculty diagnosis and treatment? This book provides a comprehensive empirical investigation of when biases are likely to occur and recommends the use of non-intuitive decision aids to assure the validity of clinical judgements.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 332 pages
• Publisher: American Psychological Association (APA); 1 edition (May 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1557984832
• ISBN-13: 978-1557984838
• Product Dimensions: 10.3 x 7.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,092,169 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars

Here are some recommendations of other readers..., July 20, 1998

By	Michael B. Miller (Minneapolis, MN USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I can't tell you how pleased and excited I was to have an opportunity to read the original manuscript of what will undoubtedly be one of the most important books in clinical psychology for the next decade or so. This, I predict, will be a classic.

-JERRY S. WIGGINS, PHD Emeritus Professor of Psychology, University of British Columbia

This book is essential reading for all mental health practitioners and should be on the reading list of all training programs. Dr. Garb provides a thorough synthesis of a disparate, diffuse, and complex literature in an exceptionally readable fashion.

-JONATHAN RABINOWITZ, DSW School of Social Work, Bar Ilan University, Israel

This book is a monumental accomplishment. It is easily the most comprehensive survey of the literature on clinical judgment available today. It forms a worthy successor to the esteemed earlier volume by Jerry Wiggins, with an even broader focus. Anyone seriously interested in clinical judgment in psychology! will surely wish to own this book.

-WILLIAM M. GROVE, PHD Department of Psychology, University of Minnesota

11 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Garb's book is the definitive work on clinical judgment., September 1, 1998

By	Richard J. McNally (Cambridge, Massachusetts) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Garb's "Studying the Clinician" is an astonishly comprehensive synthesis of nearly everything that has been done on clinical judgment in psychology. It is the successor to Wiggins's text, and it will be the definitive work on this topic for many years to come.

3 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Studies with no ecological validity, January 9, 2004

By A Customer

Though Garb offers the kind of enticing indictment of clinician reasoning that was once favored in the so-called biases and heuristic literature of the 1970s and 1980s, the review of studies in this text lack the kind of ecological validity that would have made a difference by now in our understanding of clinical reasoning. Because these studies, more often than not, display clinicians taking part in chess-games, puzzles, and mutliple-choice questions, all in an effort to show how clinicians are prone to error in clinical reasoning, the text offers the reader no sense whatsoever of how clinicians actually reason in real-time clinical settings. The absense of this ecological validity - that is, the absense of displaying clinical reasoning in real-time settings rather than in having clinicians play chess and observing their reasoning - it is this absense of ecological validity that robs the book of its claim to importance.