Making Better Use of Response Patterns: Evaluating Generalised Anxiety Disorder Through Formal Psychological Assessment

This study provides an extensive understanding of the symptomatology of Generalised Anxiety Disorder (GAD) and lays out a series of items taken from different assessment tools which assess this disorder. This will serve as a first step towards the creation of a formal psychological method of assessment. This study presented insight into the literature which is pertinent to GAD and to Formal Psychological Assessment (FPA). FPA is a growing methodology which allows for the numerical conversion of an individual’s responses to the administered assessment method. This allows the clinician to go beyond the score of the assessment result and obtain a clearer picture of the clinical case which would be adaptive to the individual’s response patterns. This study created a Boolean matrix for the items assessing GAD and symptoms of this disorder. After a thorough analysis of GAD symptomatology, 19 attributes which represent the disorder were chosen. Furthermore, items evaluating GAD were selected from 7 pre-existing assessment methods and were then linked to the respective attribute/s which they assessed; prototypical items were later selected from the matrix to form an integrated picture of the chosen assessment tools, diminishing the initial number of items needed to form an exhaustive assessment tool from 138 to 42 items. The generated matrix highlighted the relationship between each item and their respective attribute, thus granting the possibility to analyse response patterns in the future, creating the foundation for an adaptive tool for the assessment of GAD.