Psychological Assessment Workgroup (PAW)

Director: W. Keith Campbell

The Psychological Assessment Workgroup (PAW) is designed to facilitate interdisciplinary work in areas of psychological assessment. Assessment topics include but are not limited to personality, attitudes, beliefs, abilities and values. Solid psychological assessment needs three areas of expertise: content expertise, validation expertise, and quantitative expertise. In addition, design expertise is becoming important to make assessment user friendly. PAW brings together content area experts with experts in scale development.

Psychological assessment is important to answering theoretical and applied questions in many disciplines – health, finance, education, communications, leadership and organizational science, etc. – and PAW will be open to researchers in any field. Indeed, PAW is designed to be a central hub for anyone who wants to develop high quality psychological assessments or work with other individuals on campus to build assessments. We also want to be a key resource for researchers who want to build psychological assessments into their grants or contracts.

PAW will also serve an educational mission. Psychological assessment is advancing on many fronts. Quantitative methods are becoming more sophisticated and data are evolving to include not just self- or rater- reports, but also trace data, social media data, and physiological data. A goal of PAW is to stay up-to-date on these changes and bring in occasional outside experts.