Project Concept

Working title

From symptom questionnaires to person-specific causal models: augmenting conventional psychopathology assessment with perceived causal networks.

Validated psychopathology questionnaires provide standardized information about the presence and severity of psychological problems. They generally do not assess how an individual perceives these problems to influence, trigger, or maintain one another.

The present project adds a relational layer to conventional questionnaire assessment.

Assessment sequence

Validated questionnaire
        ↓
item severity / scale scores / symptom profile
        ↓
selection of personally relevant items
        ↓
pairwise perceived causal relations
        ↓
person-specific Perceived Causal Network
        ↓
network characteristics + optional participant feedback

The same questionnaire items therefore serve two functions:

• conventional measurement of symptom severity, and
• nodes in a person-specific causal representation.

This creates an unusually direct test of the incremental value of relational information because the node content is held constant while the additional information consists specifically of perceived relations between nodes.

Overarching hypothesis

Causal augmentation captures person-specific relational information that is not contained in conventional symptom severity profiles.

The project is designed as a general assessment framework rather than as a study tied to one disorder or one questionnaire. A central goal is to examine whether the same augmentation logic generalizes across different validated instruments.

What counts as added value?

See Validation Framework. Candidate forms of added value include:

• psychometric reliability,
• person specificity,
• incremental prediction,
• subjective representativeness,
• improved problem understanding,
• perceived personalization,
• potential clinical utility.

Related methodological questions

Important design choices concern Assessment/Item Selection, the exact Assessment/PCN Augmentation procedure, the choice of Analysis/Network Metrics, and whether showing the resulting network to participants provides additional value via Feedback/Network Feedback.