Pearson - Clinical and Talent Assessment - Australia and New Zealand

Designed to help meet the increasing need for a well-validated, psychometrically sound test that can provide empirical support in courtrooms and other legal institutions, the VIP test provides a broad spectrum of information about an individual’s performance on an assessment battery. As a measure of response styles, test results help assess whether the results of cognitive, neuropsychological or other types of testing should be considered representative of an individual’s overall capacities.

How to Use This Test

The VIP test is intended to provide support for conclusions that may impact the awarding of large sums of money or the determination of competence or culpability. As a result, the test is potentially useful to neuropsychologists, forensic, and clinical psychologists in a variety of situations, including:

• Civil and criminal trials

• Competency-to-stand-trial evaluations

• Medical insurance examinations

• Social Security disability reviews

• Workers compensation examinations

• Rehabilitative treatment assessments

 Key Features

• The VIP test contains verbal and nonverbal subtests, each of which can be administered independently.

• As a self-administered forced-choice validity indicator, the VIP test provides more information than a yes/no decision regarding malingering. The test helps assess the relationship between the individual’s intention and the effort in completing the test. Based on this information, the report categorizes the individual’s style as Compliant, Inconsistent, Irrelevant or Suppressed.

• A graph of results helps make it easy to explain the results in hearing or court proceedings.

• When used as part of a battery of tests, it complements most personality assessments.

• When used as a screening tool, the VIP test can help indicate who may not benefit from further, more extensive neuropsychological testing.

VIP Measures

Validity Indicators
The VIP test uses six primary validity indicators to classify an individual’s performance as either valid or invalid.
Response Styles
The test also categorises the individual’s response style as:

• Compliant: Suggests an individual’s intent to perform well, along with the probability that his or her performance is an accurate representation of ability

• Inconsistent: Suggests that the respondent is motivated to perform well but the effort is inconsistent or minimal

• Irrelevant: Suggests that the individual intended to perform poorly and that he or she was most likely responding without regard to item content

• Suppressed: Suggests high effort to perform poorly and that the individual tried to feign cognitive defects

Report Options

Interpretive Report
Respondent’s answers are not only compared to a normative group but against the individual’s own demonstrated abilities. The report contains two key sections:

1. Classification of Test Performance - Summarises the respondent’s approach to the assessment and includes a narrative explanation of the validity determination.

2. Expected and Actual Performance Curve - Graphs the test taker’s performance on test items by ascending order of item difficulty. The visual representation gives the evaluator an immediate overview of the respondent’s response style. A more detailed interpretation is included in the measurements and narrative that follow the graph.

 Profile Report
The report provides a graphical representation of the test taker’s performance on test items.

Q Local Software

Q Local is a flexible, powerful scoring and reporting software tool that allows the clinician to administer and score the VIP as well as more than 30 other Pearson assessments. More about Q Local

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