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 proper way to design such assessments is to start with a large question bank and then have a large number of people with known characteristics take it. You can then apply any number of statistical techniques to identify what questions provide independent information (and what information they provide).
In practice, this sort of process is expensive and time-consuming. Far more often, a prominent researcher just makes up something that sounds good and uses it for their research. Other people copy them, making the assessment more popular and no one much bothers to determine whether the assessment has any underlying validity.
This sort of approach had led to a ‘replication crisis’ in fields such as psychology where the majority of published results appear to have no underlying validity.
So the real answer to your question is that the assessment you’re seeing probably has little behind it except a wild guess – probably incorrect – by some researcher who didn’t have the funding to build an assessment that could measure more accurately than simply asking someone “so what kind of crazy are you?”.
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