The psychopathology of everyday art: a quantitative Study - World ...

are linked to those artistic characteristics which are interpreted by art therapists. Many
of the studies reviewed here developed their own tests for the study using artistic
characteristics which were said to be equivalent to the behaviourial symptomatic
characteristics used for diagnosis. The only criterion used in many cases was how the
experimenters thought the visual sequelae of thought disorder should look, supported by
previous examples of the same process. This is not enough. It is unsound to conclude
that paintings are or are not diagnostically valid if there is no evidence that the test items
are a) reliable themselves or b) measure any symptomatic behaviour and c) relate to visual
output. The DDS team 168 have argued that they cannot produce a validity index since
there is yet no comparable instrument with the DDS, but there are many other
established tests measuring diagnostic and other qualities which could provide non-visual
indices for DDS correlations, and which so far have not been used. Indeed, the DDS itself
has not even produced good correlations with its only criterion, diagnosis itself 169 ,
although it has produced a reliable format. Adapted tests too, must provide a criterion
measure, so that it is certain that aspects which have been deleted are not integral to the
validity of the test. The first validity question therefore must be: are these assessment
measures really measuring what they are designed to measure?
Even where obvious and relatively consistent phenomena are reported, what is
measured may be a confounding variable, something which accompanies the symptom,
168 Mills et. al. (1993) Reliability and validity tests of the Diagnostic Drawing Series,
Psychotherapy , V.20:83-88.
106
Arts in
169
See my critique later in Chapter 2, reliability analysis. DDS produced by B. Cohen, J. Hammer and
S. Singer (1988) The Diagnostic Drawing Series: a systematic approach to art therapy evaluation and
research, Arts in Ps ychotherapy , V.15(1): 11-21. Although to be fair, the DDS is head and shoulders
above the competition, and further research on the statistics would produce a more suitable analysis.