One-Stop Shopping?

Extract

The aim of this very ambitious volume is to provide information about “the pragmatics of test selection, interpretation, and report writing,” “a practitioner's guide to actual test interpretation and integration,” and “a comprehensive guide to neuropsychological assessment.” Groth-Marnat decries the absence of such “a book,” as if he expected that the broad base of neuropsychological knowledge was to be found in a single volume. There was the tacit assumption that the knowledge required for neuropsychological assessment could be adequately and sufficiently obtained from “a book” of this type. This expectation appears quite unrealistic, naïve, and simple-minded. Based on current guidelines in the profession (à la the Houston Conference), it should be expected that most of the knowledge Groth-Marnat seeks in one book can be acquired only with an extended, specialized course of study followed by intense, supervised experience. That is where one should obtain information about test selection, interpretation and integration so that the end product is “a clear, coherent description of the impact that brain dysfunction has had on a person's cognitions, personality, emotions, interpersonal relationships.” That type of knowledge, and report-writing skill, is not to be had by reading “a book.” Integrating the complexities of test data, and writing effectively, are both exceedingly difficult to teach even in an apprentice situation, and more so through a single volume. This objection thus ventilated, now on to the meat of the book.