What we will not claim
A short list of the things assessment cannot do, stated in advance rather than discovered later.
Most of what is written about psychological assessment is written to persuade someone to buy it. That literature is not a good guide to what the instruments actually do, because a limitation is a poor selling point. What follows is the other list.
We will not claim to identify anyone's calling
No instrument in existence identifies the work a person was meant to do. Instruments measure defined constructs — reasoning of particular kinds, reported preferences, characteristic ways of behaving — and place a person relative to others. The step from that to a vocation is made by people, using information that no questionnaire contains. Anyone whose report names a destiny has stopped describing measurement.
We will not claim that a score settles a disagreement
A profile is frequently brought into a family argument in the hope that it will end it. It will not, and it should not be sold as though it would. What it can do is change what the argument is about — from competing opinions to a piece of shared evidence that everyone can see. That is a real improvement and it is smaller than what is usually promised.
We will not claim precision we do not have
Scores carry error. Small differences between them are not information. We will report bands rather than points where bands are the honest form, and we will say when two of a person's scores are too close to distinguish, even though a ranked list of strengths would read better.
We will not claim that our instruments suit every purpose
Every instrument has a population it was normed on, an age range it was built for, and a set of decisions it has evidence for. Used outside those, it produces numbers without meaning. We would rather say that we do not have the right instrument for a question than supply a nearly-right one.
We will not claim to predict success
Prediction of individual outcomes from psychological measurement is weak, and it is weak for a structural reason: outcomes depend heavily on circumstances that are not properties of the person. Effort, opportunity, health, money, timing and luck are all doing work that the profile cannot see. Group-level associations are real. Their application to one named individual carries far more uncertainty than a confidently worded report suggests.
The most useful sentence in any technical manual is the one describing what the instrument should not be used for. It is also the shortest section, and in some manuals it is absent.
We will not claim that the empty parts of this site are full
This site currently carries pages whose content is being prepared — case studies, impact figures, expert profiles, testimonials. Where those are empty, they say so plainly rather than being filled with plausible material. A page that admits it is unfinished is more informative than one that is not.
Why publish this
Because the limits are going to be encountered anyway, and it is better that they are stated by us in advance than discovered by a family afterwards. An instrument used within its limits is a good instrument. The same instrument used outside them produces confident, precise, printed statements about a young person's mind that nothing in the data supports, and those statements are believed.
