Clinical versus statistical prediction : A theoretical analysis and a review of the evidence / Paul E. Meehl.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Meehl, Paul E. (Paul Everett), 1920-2003, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Psychodiagnostics.

Prediction (Psychology).

Physical Description:

1 online resource (149 pages)

Place of Publication:

Minneapolis, Minnesota : University of Minnesota Press, [1954]

Summary:

"This monograph is an expansion of lectures given in the years 1947-1950 to graduate colloquia at the universities of Chicago, Iowa, and Wisconsin, and of a lecture series delivered to staff and trainees at the Veterans Administration Mental Hygiene Clinic at Ft. Snelling, Minnesota. Perhaps a general remark in clarification of my own position is in order. Students in my class in clinical psychology have often reacted to the lectures on this topic as to a protective technique, complaining that I was biased either for or against statistics (or the clinician), depending mainly on where the student himself stood! This I have, of course, found very reassuring. One clinical student suggested that I tally the pro-con ratio for the list of honorific and derogatory adjectives in Chapter 1 (page 4), and the reader will discover that this unedited sample of my verbal behavior puts my bias squarely at the midline. The style and sequence of the paper reflect my own ambivalence and real puzzlement, and I have deliberately left the document in this discursive form to retain the flavor of the mental conflict that besets most of us who do clinical work but try to be scientists. I have read and heard too many rapid-fire, once-over-lightly "resolutions" of this controversy to aim at contributing another such. The thing is just not that simple. I was therefore not surprised to discover that the same sections which one reader finds obvious and over-elaborated, another singles out as especially useful for his particular difficulties. My thesis in a nutshell: "There is no convincing reason to assume that explicitly formalized mathematical rules and the clinician's creativity are equally suited for any given kind of task, or that their comparative effectiveness is the same for different tasks. Current clinical practice should be much more critically examined with this in mind than it has been"--Preface.

Contents:

The problem

Some preliminary distinctions

The rationality of inference from class membership

The special powers of the clinician

The theoretical argument of T. R. Sarbin

The problem of the logical reconstruction of clinical activity

Remarks on clinical intuition

Empirical comparisons of clinical and actuarial prediction

General remarks on quantification of clinical material

A final word : unavoidability of statistics.

Notes:

Description based on print version record.