Screening Procedures for Emotional Disturbances

Draw A Person: Screening Procedures for Emotional Disturbance
DAP: SPED
I)
NAME:
Draw A Person: Screening Procedures for Emotional Disturbance. (DAP: SPED)
PUBLISHER:
Psychological and Educational Publications.
DATE OF PUBLICATION:
1991 (Naglieri et al., 1991).
TYPE OF TEST:
This test is a personality assessment that is used as screening procedure for Emotional Disturbances or
behavioral disorders.
LIST OF REFERENCES:
Diagnostic Test Center- King Hall C-1062.
Calstatela Library Data Base:
http://web.ebscohost.com.mimas.calstatela.edu/ehost/delivery?vid=3&hid=8&sid=a4cc35
II)
PURPOSE OF THE TEST:
The purpose of this test is to identify children and adolescents that may have emotional or behavioral
disturbances.
ADMINISTRATION INFORMATION:
This test was created to be brief in administration and scoring time; and to incorporate the recommendations
that appear in the research literature regarding the shortfall of past human figure drawing scoring systems. It is
highly recommended not to be used in isolation and results from several sources to be obtain. Because the aim
of the DAP:SPED is to identify those who may benefit from additional evaluation, very conservative rules,
which reduce the numbers of individuals selected that are not appropriate.
The DAP: SPED test can be administered by professionals who wish to identify children and adolescents who
may have emotional problems; which are sometimes related with behavioral problems. In addition, school
counselors may choose to use this test to recognize those who need to be part of an individual or group
counseling setting.
1
Furthermore, school psychologists and evaluation specialist can use the DAP: SPED test as a portion of the
regular psycho educational assessment battery. Professionals can also choose to use the test as a general
screening during an initial interview or initial family assessment. Including, a variety of persons in the helping
professions, diagnosticians, behavioral specialist, special education personnel, speech and language specialist,
rehabilitation professionals, physicians and social workers.
The administrators must have certain qualifications such as proper training, or similar training procedures,
experience in test theory and development, or in individual and group assessment procedures provided by
training manuals. Although, the state or the school district must be checked for administration due for
qualification; the requirements may vary.
The time to administer is a maximum of five minutes for each drawing which are labeled man, woman and
self. The individual or group is instruct to draw, a picture of a man with the page labeled man, woman or self;
and the examinee or examinees are instructed to do the same on the other two pages.
The Draw A Person screening (DAP: SPED) procedure or emotional disturbance is to be administered for
children and adolescent ages 6 to 17. The individual or group is to draw three separate pages of the Record
Form. Examiners are required to follow standard procedures that are detailed step by step in the manual.
Furthermore, the examinees are given appropriate information about the testing, and a setting that is
well-lighted and free from distractions. The examinee(s) should be given a pencil with an eraser and the DAP:
SPED Record Form. The identification and demographic information on the front page of the Record From
should be complete. If administering to a special population it is especially important for the examiner to refer
to Sattler (1988) for a thorough discussion of test administration in regards to rapport, following instruction,
and so on. The DAP: SPED must be administered as indicated and directed in the manual and Record Form
by using the wording and procedures specified. Allowing 5 minutes maximum between the three drawings of
man, woman, and self. If finished prior to 5 minutes then examinee is instructed to move on to the next
drawing. If the examiner is ask by the examinee how he or she should make the drawing, the appropriate
potion(s) of direction must be restated. The Record Form should be place in front of the examinee with the
page labeled “Man” at the bottom exposed. Then give the instruction verbally from the instruction manual.
Instruct and state verbally each drawing and allow the allotted time. Examiner must demonstrate and point to
the page labeled at the bottom of the page. The examinee is asked to produce three drawings a man, woman,
and self on separate pages of the Record Form. These drawings are scored for content (for 55 specific features
indentified in an exhaustive review of the literature) and for size and placement using convenient templates
that eliminate the need for time-consuming measurements.
III)
TECHNICAL ASPECTS.
The DAP: SPED was developed using an actuarial approach to the identification of individuals with
emotional and behavioral problems. The intention of this assessment is to have an objective method to
determine the frequency of unusually considered indicators of emotional conflicts that occur in normal versus
exceptional population. Scoring of the DAP: SPED involves three steps such as: First, computing the
chronological age of the individual. Second, summing the raw scores for the man, woman, and self-drawing to
obtain the DAP: SPED total raw score. The third step is to convert the Draw A Person (DAP) total raw score
to a standard score using the appropriate table in this manual by age (6-8, 9-12, and 13-17) and gender and
recorded on the Record Form. All identifying information on the front of the Record Form is to complete the
steps as follows: recording one (1) point for each item , the examinee earns credit on the man, woman, and
self drawing by using the age appropriate template; and record the total score for each figure on the front of
the Record Form. After sum the man, woman, and self-scores are to obtain the DAP: SPED raw score.
Followed by converting the DAP: SPED raw score to the standard (T) score using Appendix A. Then, convert
the DAP: SPED standard score to a percentile rank using Appendix B. Determine the level of confidence you
2
wish to use, and record the appropriate confidence interval from Appendix C. Add and subtract these
confidence interval values to and from the obtained DAP: SPED standard score to obtain the upper and lower
limits of the confidence interval; then, record these values on the Record Form. Finally, determine the DAP:
SPED. The examinee status and record this in the indicated space on the Record Form. There are no samples
when administering this assessment.
The DAP:SPED was developed for use as a screening measure to assist children and adolescents who may
have emotional and related behavioral disorders; which may serve as a signal to help determine if additional
assessment is warranted. Although, the standard score are to be use with caution and viewed in context of all
available information. Diagnosis of emotional or behavioral disorders should not be applied on basis of any
one score; instead, the results from several sources should be obtained. Since, the DAP: SPED is intended to
screen measure to identify those individuals who would likely benefit from additional evaluation, the scores
can be classifying in three categories, as follows: those for whom additional assessment is not indicated with a
score less than 55; for whom it is indicated for further evaluation with a score between 55-64; or those whom
it is strongly indicated for further evaluation with a score of 65 and above. It is important and recommended
that the cutoff scores are not to be rigidly applied and carefully considered. It is recognize that any screening
approach has limitations. Therefore, it may be suggested that users cautiously apply other criteria depending
upon their settings and goals. When interpreting the Standard Scores the T scores yielded by the DAP:SPED
are set to have a mean of 50 and a standard deviation of 10; and are intended to inform the user how the
individual is ranked in relation to others in the same group. The T scores are set so that the higher the score,
the more likely it is that emotional disturbance exist. While, percentile ranks are used to represent the
percentage of individuals in the standardization age group who scored the same as or higher than a particular
percentage of that sample.
These scores are limited because they do not represent equal units of measurements at all levels of the normal
distribution. The man, woman, and self-drawings used to standardize the DAP: SPED were the same ones
used to standardize the Draw A Person: A Quantitative Scoring System. Drawings were obtained in the fall of
1984 using sample of 4,468 individuals ages 5 to 17 years during the same group testing session in which the
Matrix Analogies Test Short Form was administered for standardization. The DAP: SPED standardization
comprised 2,260 of the 2,622 individuals used to standardize the DAP: Quantitative Scoring System. For that
test, a sample of about 200 individuals at each year from ages 5-17 was deemed sufficiently large to provide
stable norms.
The clarity of the direction is very satisfactory for the examiner and examinee. The directions are very specific
and give step by step instructions. Specifying several times in the manual the importance of using
administering DAP: SPED and including specifics such as, when to pauses, how to demonstrate assessment,
what type of conditions of test testing, information, etc. The examiner is emphasized to follow the guidelines
exactly as directed on the manual on where, how, who, and what to administer.
The items are responded to the examinee self-scoring the three drawings of a man, woman and self. In the
DAP: SPED the manual did not include instruction for children and adolescents which require special
accommodations (Naglieri, 1991).
Using the 1980 census data as a guide, a sample representative of the U.S. population in terms of age, sex,
geographic region, race, socioeconomic status, and ethnicity identified. Appropriate numbers of cases are
selected from the larger source sample of 4,468 kindergarteners through 12the graders (grade level) used to
norm the MAT-SF that can be seen by referring to Naglieri (1988), for additional details. Tables were
included in the manual of demographic data (figure 2.5-2.8), numbers and percentages of males and females
(gender) from ages 6 to 17 years (ages); and for the three age groups of 6-8, 9-12, 13-17 years (figure 2.5).
Including, race such as White, Black, and other and standardization sample by Spanish Origin (Spanish origin,
Non-Spanish Origin). Also geographic distribution of the DAP:SPED sample by age including geographic
region such as Northeast, North Central, South, and West; which closely approximates the regional
3
distribution of the U.S. population (Table 2.6). The socioeconomic status (SES) of the individuals included in
the DAP: SPED standardization sample was determined on a school-by-school rather than child-by-child
basis. Schools were selected so that the sample would reflect the range of SES. Since, all students in the
selected classes were included and an equal number of classes at each grade were drawn with each district,
selection bias was reduced considerably. Moreover, the result for the annual household incomes reported in
Table 2.9 and type of occupation in Table 2.10 suggested that the standardization sample has an appropriate
distribution of SES characteristics. Also, DAP: SPED standardization sample included individuals from
communities classified as small (pop < than 5000), medium (pop between 5,000 and 25,000), and large (pop
>than 25,000). The sample comprised of 21% from small (rural) communities, 56% from medium sized
communities, and 23% from large communities. Again, the values are very similar to the composition of the
U.S. population according to urban and suburban (78%) and rural (22%) classifications (Naglieri et al., 1991).
IV)
EVIDENCE FOR TEST VALIDITY
In the manual it is stated that validity of any test cannot be estimated from one administration, but rather,
requires an entire body of information accumulated over a period of time. Additionally, establishing evidence
of test validity is a complex task that should be examine in relation to the intended use of the test and under
different experimental conditions.
It should be recalled that the drawing of the man, woman, and self have been used as measures of intellectual
functioning for some time (Harris, 1963; Naglieri, 1988). The DAP: SPED is unrelated to intellectual
performance. This was accomplished by obtaining the correlation between the DAP: SPED scores and scores
from the MAT-SF, a nonverbal test that uses the progressive matrix format. The results were that this was a
very low insignificant correlation which illustrates the independence of the DAP: SPED and intelligence as
measured by the MAT-SF (Naglieri et al., 1991). Furthermore, in investigating the validity of the Draw A
Person: Screening Procedure for Emotional Disturbance: measurement validity with high risk youth, state,
DAP: SPED scores were found to be particularly effective at measuring internalized behavioral disturbance,
in children receiving outpatient or residential treatment (Matto, 2002). In addition in discriminate validity of
the Draw-A-Person Screening Procedure for Emotional Disturbance for incarcerated juvenile delinquents in
special education state, “DAP:SPED scores successfully differentiated delinquent adolescents who were
placed in educational-correctional setting for behavioral problems form a matched control group (N=154; d
value=1.6)”(Matavich, 1998).
The validity of the Draw-A-Person: Screening Procedures for Emotional Disturbance (DAP: SPED) in
Strengths-Based Assessment. According to Naglieri, 1991, “DAP: SPED is an important contribution to the
measurement literature that obtains information directly from a unique wide range of applicability (6 to 18
years old), as compared to other youth-reported behavioral measures that may restrict the range of
applicability because of the use of verbal formats (e.g., 11-18; 2005)”. Again, it is a practical screening
measure because its applicability to a wide and unique range.
V)
EVIDENCE FOR RELIABILITY
In the test-retest stability and reliability, the stability of the DAP: SPED is examine by administering the
scale two times over a 1-week interval to a sample of 67 students. The result suggested that the first
administration had little or no important effect on the student's performance when drawing a second time;
which indicates both experiments are independent of each other. The significant Pearson correlation of .67
indicated there was much similarity between the performances of the students consisted over time.
4
Future implication of the DAP: SPED warrants its reliability of its intention to be use as a screening measure
to identify children and adolescents; whom would likely benefit from additional evaluations that may have
emotional and related behavioral problems. As with any screening device, the results may serve as a signal to
help determine if additional assessment are necessary. The standard score should not be use in isolation, but
should be use with caution. Suggestion, to use several sources including the DAP: SPED (Naglieri, 1991) are
noted.
The standard error of measurement (SEM) is obtained directly from the reliability coefficient using the
formula: SEM= SD X [(1-Reliability Coefficient)1/2]. Included is table 3.1 with experimental table.
VI)
SUMMARY
The strengths of the DAP:SPED is that it is easy and it does not require too much time to administer; which is
beneficial for the examiner and examinee(s). Especially, for those examinee(s) who may have a problem with
sitting for long periods or a short attention span. Since the DAP: SPED does not require any reading, only
drawing, therefore DAP: SPED may be given to a variety of children and adolescent that may not know how
to read or write; although they are required to fill in their identifying information. Benefits from being used as
a screening measure is used to identify those individuals who would likely benefit from additional evaluation.
Nevertheless, since the DAP:SPED is intended to be used solely as a screening measure it would not be able
to be used individually. Moreover, it does not have any suggestions of instructions in other languages or those
who may have physical or visual impairments, or may require additional accommodations (Naglieri et al.,
1991).
I would use the DAP: SPED as a screening measure on those individuals who would benefit from additional
evaluations.
REFERENCES
Calstatela Library data base:
http://web.ebscohost.com.mimas.calstatela.edu/ehost/delivery?vid=3&hid=8&sid=a4cc35
Diagnostic Test Center (CALSTATELA) KH C-1062
First Floor-Wing C
Encyclopedia of Medical Disorders-2009
www.minddisorders.com/Del-Fi/Figure-drawings.html
Psychological and Educational Publication, Inc.-2009
www.psych.edupublications.com/emotional.html
Western Psychological Services-2009
www.portal.wpspublish.com/pls/portal/url/page/wps/EM-56
5