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About ISA
As professionals we are legally bound to provide expertise and expert information that are based on sound evidence (a Chartered Psychologist is bound by the British Psychological Society’s Code of Ethics). Since the expertise we offer is about people’s psychological processes and states of mind, we have a duty of care for our clients. In respect of assessments using the ISA conceptual framework particular attention is to be focussed on the validity of the assessments that are being made for clients and the claims that derive from these assessments.
The effective use of ISA requires input from the professional investigator whose first task is to generate appropriate identity instruments that are customised for clients, whatever the cultural imperatives to which they adhere. The especial contribution that is the mark of the ISA approach is its robust sensitivity to the individual’s appraisal of the social world in any cultural milieu (e.g., according to nation, language and religion, such as Spanish, Korean, Chinese, Anglo-Saxon, Russian, Hebrew, Confucianism, Islam, Shinto, Afro-Caribbean, and so on). This is in stark contrast to traditional psychometric procedures which, while being appropriate for assessments that assume particular social norms, fail in their generality across cultural milieus where quite different cultural imperatives predominate.
However, this mark of ISA puts a particular onus on the investigator to be aware of special requirements necessary to generate identity instruments. Unlike the well-established procedures of the psychometric tradition, when the investigator may rely on groundwork having been appropriately carried out for the generation of psychometric scales, those required by ISA call upon the investigator’s awareness of cultural sensitivities and individual biographies. ISA procedures require relevant pilot work. With ISA the emic aspects of identity (i.e., the culturally specific qualitative content) are integrated within parameters of identity that are etic (i.e., cross-culturally universal in respect of the definitions of psychological concepts and their quantitative metrics). Etic parameters of identity are achieved within ISA by way of algebraic ‘standardisation’ procedures that are uniquely implemented using dedicated computer software for each and every individual assessment that is made. But the validity of these procedures crucially depends on the appropriateness of the identity instruments generated by investigators.
This presentation reviews ISA concepts and calls attention to possible investigator errors that undermine the validity of assessments of ISA parameters of identity, validity being a foremost ethical issue. Throughout this exposition attention is directed to the integration of ‘qualitative’ features of identity with ‘quantitative’ parameters of identity. The validity of assessment of identity processes requires the integrity of both the qualitative, culturally informed, features and the quantitative, culturally comparative, parameters.
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