How to Create a Psychological Test

Psychological tests can be useful in collecting information on an individual's mental health. Psychological tests can be broken down into various categories including achievement/aptitude, intelligence, neuropsychological, occupational and personality. Many tests have previously been created to test individuals in each of these categories with great reliability. If a more specific test is needed, you can create your own. When creating your own test, it's important to make sure the test is valid and reliable.

Instructions

• 1

  Decide what you want the test to measure. Research the symptoms or signs of the specific disorder or trait that you're measuring.

• 2

  Create a variety of questions that cover all aspects of the trait. You should create more questions than you want on the test because after testing for reliability and validity some questions will need to be removed. Questions should use a five-point Likert rating scale with answer choices: strongly disagree, disagree, neutral, agree and strongly agree.

• 3

  Administer the test to two groups of people: people with the trait/disorder and people without the trait/disorder. Run a statistical analysis of the answers with a program such as SPSS or Excel to find the reliability and validity of each test item.

• 4

  Remove the questions that are unreliable or invalid.

• 5

  Compile a test with the remaining questions. Administer the test to individuals as needed.