The quality of the initial assessment represents one of the predictors of positive therapeutic outcomes, thus an increasing amount of research focuses on the development of more accurate assessment tools [1]. In clinical practice, the most widely adopted tools for assessment are clinical interview, semistructured interviews and psychological testing. Clinicians follow two main criteria in developing the sequence of questions to ask: (1) choosing questions to collect information for both diagnosis and case formulation and (2) trying to reduce redundancy. These criteria are not satisfied by self-report questionnaires because of methodological problems deriving from adopting a psychometric approach in psycho-diagnosis. Since questionnaires mainly provide quantitative information (scores), they are unsuitable for collecting structured qualitative information. Furthermore, psychometric theory emphasizes the importance of obtaining reliable measures even through redundancy [2].
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