Discrepant Results in Mental Health Research

Andres De Los Reyes is Professor of Psychology at the University of Maryland at College Park. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology, and Chaired the American Psychological Association's (APA's) Board of Educational Affairs. He received the APA's Distinguished Scientific Award for an Early Career Contribution to Psychology, as well as an APA Presidential Citation. He is a Fellow of the APA and Association for Psychological Science, and a Fulbright Scholar.

Scientific studies often produce results that disagree. What to make of the discrepant findings? This book provides a scholarly, novel, and candid appraisal of discrepant results in mental health research. De Los Reyes draws from work in physics, medicine, history and more to make this a very engaging read. Assessment is core to all that scientists do and this book, largely focused on psychological science, has lessons that apply to science more generally as well as other domains such as government, policy, and law where assessments are used to monitor health, welfare, and social processes. The book provides a contribution without peer in how to conceptualize, use, and interpret assessments and the concrete implications that result.

• Preface Acknowledgements 1. The Errors of Yesterday, and the Dark Matter of Today=================================================================Part I: Describing Discrepant Results2. The Ubiquity of Discrepant Results in Research3. Should Discrepant Results Promote a Crisis of Confidence?4. How Discrepant Results Reveal Blueprints for Discovery=================================================================Part II: Conceptualizing Discrepant Results5. Structurally Different Informants, Triangulation, and Falsifiability6. Why Theories about Rater Biases Fail to Explain Discrepant Results7. The Operations Triad Model=================================================================Part III: Validating Discrepant Results8. The CONTEXT Validation Paradigm9. Constructing Measurement Batteries10. Distinguishing Discrepant Results from Bias and Noise=================================================================Part IV: Project CONTEXT11. The Operations Triad System and Connections to the History of Science12. Study Design and Measurement Validation Battery 13. Insights About Data Sources, Validation Testing, and Theory=================================================================Part V: How Discrepant Results Inform Scientific Practices 14. Clinical Utility 15. Meta-Analysis16. Research, Education, and Training=================================================================Part VI: When Clinic Assessments Produce Discrepant Results17. The Ubiquity of Discrepant Results in the Clinic18. The Needs-to-Goals Gap Framework19. How the Operations Triad System Informs Assessing Clients=================================================================Part VII: Future Directions in Discrepant Results Research20. Instrumentation21. Analytic Procedures22. Clinical Populations23. Replication and Reproduction=================================================================24. The Power of Discrepant Results?The Dark Matter in Mental Health Research About the AuthorReferences