Discuss Issues of Reliability and Validity Associated with the Classification and Diagnosis of Phobic Disorders

1106 Words5 Pages
A phobia can be defined as an irrational fear that people feel the need to avoid. It has to give off an excessive reaction and has to interfere with a person’s everyday routine. There are two branches of phobia these are: Social phobias and specific phobias. In order for people with phobias to be treated they need to be diagnosed by a doctor or clinician. In order for them to be diagnosed properly, diagnostic criteria is used. One of the key points on the criteria is that individuals must recognise that their behaviour is unreasonable otherwise the clinician may diagnose them to another mental illness e.g. Schizophrenia. Another thing is that Anxiety is not necessarily a phobia therefore instead of being phobic they may be labelled as just very anxious. Reliability is an important thing in terms of diagnosing phobias as they have to be consistent and accurate. In order to examine reliability we look at two things, the first being inter-rater reliability which is when three specialists observe the person with the phobia and assess accordingly to see whether they all agree. Skyre et al (1991) investigated inter-rater reliability and looked at diagnosing social phobias. They asked 3 clinicians to assess 54 patient interviews that used the structured clinical interview. They found that there was a high inter-rater reliability which showed that the diagnosis of phobia is reliable. However they only looked at social phobias and didn’t consider any specific phobias therefore it cannot be generalised meaning that it is low in external validity. Also they only used interviews which means there are issues with self-report data. Social desirability bias could also occur as the participants may act in a certain way to make themselves look better even though it’s not necessarily their true behaviour. The other way of examining reliability is through test re-test, which is

More about Discuss Issues of Reliability and Validity Associated with the Classification and Diagnosis of Phobic Disorders

Open Document