No abstract

Satisfaction with pediatric neuropsychological evaluations was surveyed by asking parents or guardians of children who completed pediatric neuropsychological evaluations at a large children's hospital over a 2-year period to complete a 30-item rating scale. The scale included items drawn from published measures of consumer satisfaction, and incorporated a well-validated measure of general satisfaction. A total of 338 surveys were distributed, with 117 completed, for a return rate of 35%. Respondents were generally similar to non-respondents, except that respondents had a higher average level of maternal education and were more likely to have been referred for neuropsychological evaluations by sources outside the hospital. Parents were generally satisfied with pediatric neuropsychological evaluations, although some parents indicated that the evaluations did not provide as much help as expected. A factor analysis of the survey instrument revealed four dimensions of satisfaction: General Satisfaction, Clinician Acceptance/Empathy, Provision of Help, and Facilities/Administrative Assistance. Maternal education was negatively correlated with all four factors, but no other demographic, patient, or clinician variables were significantly related to satisfaction. Future studies could survey physicians and educators to provide a more complete understanding of satisfaction with pediatric neuropsychological evaluations.

This study identified malingering strategies of test performance and investigated their presence in the responses to computer-mediated versions of Rey's Dot-Counting and 15-Items tests, a forced-choice symptom validity procedure and the Memory Assessment Scales (MAS). Sixty volunteer subjects were randomly assigned to control (n = 30) or malingering (n = 30) groups. The control subjects were instructed to perform their best and the malingerers were instructed to fake a poor performance on the tests. As expected, malingering subjects scored significantly worse than control subjects on virtually all tests. Malingerers had slower response times on most tests. They also performed worse on recognition tasks in contrast to performance on recall tasks. Their response style was characterized by intentional wrong and random responding on recognition tasks. Malingerers did not show the expected worse-than-chance responding on the forced-choice symptom validity procedure. Current tests of symptom validity may not have sufficient sensitivity to detect milder forms of malingering.