Chunk #75 — Psychopathology Description and Diagnosis — On the Comprehensiveness, Utility, and Parsimony of Using Homogeneous Constructs to Describe Psychopathology — The utility of disaggregation in psychopathology description
Another aspect of utility is the time taken to conduct a diagnostic assessment. Widiger and Lowe (2008) offered a practical proposal for personality disorder assessment in which a client is assessed across the 26 facets of personality thought to be most clinically relevant. They noted that assessment in this way takes approximately half the time necessary for a DSM–IV personality disorder assessment. Elsewhere in this special section, Mullins-Sweatt and Widiger (2009) provide additional proposals that speak to the efficiency of this form of description. It thus appears that in less time, one can obtain assessment data that clinicians find more useful.
