Validity Indicator Profile (VIP)

R.I. Frederick

Designed to help meet the increasing need for a well-validated, psychometrically sound test that can provide empirical support in courtrooms and other legal institutions, the VIP test provides a broad spectrum of information about an individual’s performance on an assessment battery.

As a measure of response styles, test results help assess whether the results of cognitive, neuropsychological or other types of testing should be considered representative of an individual’s overall capacities.

How to Use This Test

• Civil and criminal trials

• Competency-to-stand-trial evaluations

• Medical insurance examinations

• Social Security disability reviews

• Workers compensation examinations

• Rehabilitative treatment assessments

Key Features

• As a self-administered forced-choice validity indicator, the VIP test provides more information than a yes/no decision regarding malingering. The test helps assess the relationship between the individual’s intention and the effort in completing the test. Based on this information, the report categorizes the individual’s style as Compliant, Inconsistent, Irrelevant or Suppressed.

• A graph of results helps make it easy to explain the results in hearing or court proceedings.

• When used as part of a battery of tests, it complements most personality assessments.

VIP Measures

The VIP test uses six primary validity indicators to classify an individual’s performance as either valid or invalid.   

The test also categorises the individual’s response style as:     

Suggests an individual’s intent to perform well, along with the probability that his or her performance is an accurate representation of ability   

Suggests that the respondent is motivated to perform well but the effort is inconsistent or minimal

Suggests that the individual intended to perform poorly and that he or she was most likely responding without regard to  item content

Suggests high effort to perform poorly and that the individual tried to feign cognitive defects

Test Development

• Traumatic brain injured patients

• Suspected malingerers

• Normal subjects

• A “faking bad” group

• A group of random responders

Report Options

Respondent’s answers are not only compared to a normative group but against the individual’s own demonstrated abilities. The report contains two key sections:  

Summarises the respondent’s approach to the assessment and includes a narrative explanation of the validity determination.

Graphs the test taker’s performance on test items by ascending order of item difficulty. The visual representation give the evaluator an immediate overview of the respondent’s response style. A more detailed interpretation is included in the measurements and narrative that follow the graph.

The report provides a graphical representation of the test taker’s performance on test items.