Psychometric and clinical test-retest reliability of the halstead impairment index in a sample of healthy, young, normal men

Twenty-nine normal young men were administered the Halstead Battery and two additional tests commonly employed by neuropsychologists and were re-examined by the same instruments 20 weeks later. The results indicate that for our sample of normal Ss the classification of an individual as “normal” by the Halstead Impairment Index is a clinical judgment with a very high degree of reliability. Data from two comparison groups (patients with cerebrovascular disease and patients with chronic schizophrenia) lent support to this conclusion. A similar study with other samples of normal Ss as well as other better defined and matched psychiatric and brain-damaged Ss is needed both to cross-validate and to extend this finding in order to increase the practicing clinician’s confidence in his interpretation of an obtained value falling in the normal range for a given individual. Clinical neuropsychology is rapidly developing to the point that such validity (clinical reliability) for such individual judgments is no longer a hope but an increasingly more probable expectation.