Actuarial versus Clinical Prediction in Psychopathology

Abstract

The question at issue now, as it was in 1954 when Meehl's book Clinical versus Statistical Prediction was published, is how may we best, most accurately and most efficiently predict the socially, clinically, and theoretically significant characteristics and behaviours of our patients. In the introduction to his book Meehl said ‘My thesis in a nutshell: there is no convincing reason to assume that explicitly formalized mathematical rules and the clinician's creativity are equally suited for any given kind of task, or that their comparative effectiveness is the san*e for different tasks. Current clinical practice should be much more critically examined with this in mind than it has been.’