I’ve taken a few different mental assessments and they all follow the same formula for the most part. One question will say “have you ever thought about cutting yourself” and then 14 questions later, “have you ever thought about harming yourself” and then some weird question right after like “do you like school?”
And it’s like 60 questions like this on the sheet it just seems so weird to me. Do people really not notice the pattern? Is it meant to be visible? Is there some psychology behind it?
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The different wording allows you to catch edge cases and so forth. So say you’re testing for kleptomania, and you have one question which is “do you feel like you need to steal things?”. And then someone thinks “oh, I don’t need to, I just choose to” so you put in “do you sometimes steal things you don’t need?” or whatever. (And in the reverse way, someone could feel a compulsion but not go through with it.)
There are also statistical ways to catch liars with these sorts of multiple-questions, but my grandfather designed a lot of those tests and he says he puts little stock in that.
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