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Paul E. Meehl
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Clinical Versus Statistical Prediction: A Theoretical Analysis and a Review of the Evidence

by Dr Paul E Meehl (Author)
4.1 4.1 out of 5 stars 24 ratings
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Clinical versus Statistical Prediction is Paul Meehl's famous examination of benefits and disutilities related to the different ways of combining information to make predictions. It is a clarifying analysis as relevant today as when it first appeared.

A major methodological problem for clinical psychology concerns the relation between clinical and actuarial methods of arriving at diagnoses and predicting behavior. Without prejudging the question as to whether these methods are fundamentally different, we can at least set forth the obvious distinctions between them in practical applications. The problem is to predict how a person is going to behave: What is the most accurate way to go about this task?

Clinical versus Statistical Prediction offers a penetrating and thorough look at the pros and cons of human judgment versus actuarial integration of information as applied to the prediction problem. Widely considered the leading text on the subject, Paul Meehl's landmark analysis is reprinted here in its entirety, including his updated preface written forty-two years after the first publication of the book.

This classic work is a must-have for students and practitioners interested in better understanding human behavior, for anyone wanting to make the most accurate decisions from all sorts of data, and for those interested in the ethics and intricacies of prediction. As Meehl puts it, "When one is dealing with human lives and life opportunities, it is immoral to adopt a mode of decision-making which has been demonstrated repeatedly to be either inferior in success rate or, when equal, costlier to the client or the taxpayer."

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  1. ISBN-10
    0963878492
  2. ISBN-13
    978-0963878496
  3. Publisher
    Echo Point Books & Media
  4. Publication date
    February 12, 2013
  5. Language
    English
  6. Dimensions
    7.5 x 0.35 x 9.25 inches
  7. Print length
    164 pages
  8. See all details
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Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Echo Point Books & Media (February 12, 2013)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 164 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0963878492
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0963878496
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 10.4 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.5 x 0.35 x 9.25 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.1 4.1 out of 5 stars 24 ratings

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Paul E. Meehl

Paul E. Meehl

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Customer reviews

4.1 out of 5 stars
4.1 out of 5
24 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United States on February 27, 2017
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Excellent
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4.0 out of 5 stars An analysis of interviews VS psychological tests
Reviewed in the United States on April 15, 2002
Despite the ago of this book (written around 1954 as an expansion of lectures given in the years 1947-1950, fifth printing (unchanged) in 1963), the points raised by Paul Meehl remain current.
Paul Meehl asks himself the question what "how can we predict how a person is going to behave?". He distinguishes 2 main approaches: clinical interviews VS statistics (psychometric tests) and discusses the pros and cons of both approaches.
For decades psychologists have been struggling between the use of tests (statistics) and (clinical) interviews. I ran into the problem myself when I did a Whiplash study in 1999 and found that many doctors made clear mistakes during the patient's LAB Profile interviews, to such an extend that the produced data was unreliable for further research! Since then, I reluctantly moved over to the testing side and co-developed the iWAM test (see jobEQ.com), but I recommend complementing tests with structured follow up interviews to check the validity of the test answers.
One of his main points pro testing is that "Every hour a clinician spends in thinking and talking about whom to treat, and how and how long, is being subtracted from the available pool of therapeutic time itself." The main counter argument of a clinician will be that every individual is a separate case and thus becomes hard to find in the numbers.
In global, one can say that Meehl holds a quite impartial point of view and tries to present approaches in a factual manner, trying to bring them together. A slight bias towards testing may be expected, given that Paul Meehl was a professor of Psychology and psychiatry at the University of Minnesota and also wrote a book on the clinical use of MMPI.
Complementary books you may what to read are "Psychological testing" by Kaplan & Saccuzzo (2001) and "How to think straight about psychology" by Stanovich, 2001
18 people found this helpful
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Sparrow
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United States on May 15, 2015
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Good book at a good price!
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Timothy M.
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United States on September 20, 2015
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thank you loved it
One person found this helpful
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David Robinson
1.0 out of 5 stars Overpriced
Reviewed in the United States on March 20, 2019
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Even though this book was groundbreaking at its publishing; you should keep in mind it is over 50 years old and only 138 pages. The asking price is utterly ridiculous!
6 people found this helpful
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Loyd
5.0 out of 5 stars Importance of Meehl's "little book"
Reviewed in the United States on February 20, 2012
This is probably one of the most important books ever written (early 50's), and as a result widely ignored by fields that relied (or rely) upon subjective judgements such as medicine. The last time I read anything about this issue, there had not been one study that contradicted Meehl's basic findings (see for example, work by Hastie and Dawes). Yet, irrational decision making is pervasive. Years ago I went through medical school and a psychiatry residency without one reference to this book. I had to find this on my own, and fortunately did so in the late 70's. This and issues such as construct validity, improper linear models, and at least the idea of Bayesian statistics got me into a lot of trouble with my fellow workers in mental health who made totally irrational clinical decisions seriously harming many people (I worked in public mental health centers for the most part); so ultimately Meehl was responsible for my ending a very frustrating career in public psychiatry. Long story. People always tell me I should write a book. Of all the things I studied for many years, Meehl was the foundation.
26 people found this helpful
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J. Ruscio
5.0 out of 5 stars Definitive treatment of clinical prediction
Reviewed in the United States on March 29, 2007
More than half a century after its original publication in 1954, this remains the most important scholarly work on this subject. As Meehl noted in this monograph and elsewhere, he most emphatically was not comparing different ways of gathering information (e.g., tests vs. interviews). Rather, he was comparing different ways of integrating whatever information has been gathered to make the most valid predictions possible, and thereby to use the most ethically defensible decision-making procedure. One could gather the information through tests (standardized, projective, etc.), interviews (structured, unstructured, or semi-structured), archival records (school, medical, criminal, etc.), informants (family, coworkers, etc.), and a number of other ways.

Meehl's analysis dealt with how all of this information is combined. Should we do it in our heads, or should we use a mechanical decision aid, such as an equation or an actuarial table? He presented a sophisticated analysis of the task and considered conditions that might favor each approach. In one chapter, he reviewed the available empirical data, but this is not the focal point of this monograph.

An article by Grove and Meehl (1996) provides an excellent treatment of objections to mechanical decision aids, with persuasive rebuttals for each, and a meta-analysis by Grove et al (2000) provide a quantitative review of the empirical literature on the subject, including 136 studies that met fairly strict inclusion criteria (in contrast to the 20 studies that were available to Meehl for review in 1954).

Meehl's original conclusion that mechanical decision aids achieve validity rates equal or superior to those of experts exercising their unaided judgment has stood the test of time and is now supported by such a large and diverse array of studies that an impartial reader can reasonably conclude that this "controversy" has been settled.
20 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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Andrew Dalby
2.0 out of 5 stars Short, almost incomprehensible and written in a grating personal style.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 30, 2022
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I fail to see why anyone considers this a master work. It is confusing , poorly written, contradictory, unnecessarily subjective and at times ad hominem. What it wants to say could have been said in two pages and much more effectively. The only useful part is Chapter 8 which is the actual comparison of actuarial and clinical predictions and as all of those studies are from 80 years ago. This is hardly of any relevance other than historical interest. The issue of reproducibility in science has rendered many of the arguments irrelevant and the work of Kahneman and particularly Tversky with his work on measures has gone far beyond Meehl's contribution.
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GREGOIRE
5.0 out of 5 stars excellent
Reviewed in France on July 5, 2015
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très bonne réédition d'un ouvrage datant de 1954, qui fait référence. L'analyse est très claire et reste parfaitement d'actualité; l'intérêt de ce type de travail reste entier et en fait il existe peu d'articles s'intéressant vraiment à l'intérêt des algorithmes dans nos prises de décisions (par rapport à nos intuitions); dans le monde robotisé dans lequel nous plongeons, il est important d'avoir la vision d'une autre époque.
2 people found this helpful
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