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The Shedler-Westen Assessment Personality Test & Its Uses

Personality tests are given to clients to ascertain the presence of a personality disorder. Most personality tests are questionnaires which ask the client to describe his own personality traits. The Shedler-Westen Assessment Procedure is a personality test that uses a somewhat different method for arriving at personality disorder diagnoses.

  1. SWAP

    • The Shedler-Westen Assessment Procedure, or SWAP, is a personality test that the clinician completes, rather than the client. Due to the nature of their conditions, individuals with personality disorders might not answer a self-reporting questionnaire in a candid manner. The SWAP seeks to bypass this self-reporting bias with the objective opinions of the clinician. For the most part, self-reporting instruments are ineffective for identifying individuals with psychological problems.

    Standard Vocabulary

    • The SWAP contains 200 statements that the clinician rates with a score of zero to seven, zero meaning the statement is not true at all, and seven meaning that the statement is most descriptive of the client. The SWAP is a jargon-free questionnaire that can be used by clinicians in all disciplines. The creators of the SWAP, Jonathan Shedler and Drew Westen, intended that the statements within the questionnaire be clearly written so that clinicians would not need to make any inferences. The clinician should be able to focus solely on reporting what she has witnessed regarding the client's personality.

    Reliability & Validity

    • One of the reasons given for the initial development of the SWAP was the overall lack of validity and reliability of previous personality diagnostic instruments. Validity is the extent to which an assessment instrument tests what it purports to test. Reliability is the consistency of the results achieved through the use of an instrument. Most personality disorder questionnaires have low reliability and validity. In particular, they lack test-retest reliability. This means that the same questionnaire can be given to the same client on multiple occasions and elicit widely divergent responses. The SWAP, on the other hand, has been shown to be both reliable and valid.

    Uses

    • The SWAP is useful to clinicians in determining the presence of a personality disorder in their clients. The test combines diagnostic criteria from both the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) III and DSM-IV. The SWAP has versions for detecting personality disorders in both adults and adolescents. The instrument combines clinicians' powers of observation, their diagnostic knowledge and their experience with clients to assist them in detecting personality disorders.

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