Specificity
Synonyms
Definition
Specificity is a clinical outcome statistic concerned with evaluating the accuracy of a test/measure to predict what the test/measure purports to predict. It is the true negative rate for a test/measure. It answers the question, knowing that the person does not belong to a certain group (e.g., poor effort), what percentage of these people will actually be correctly identified as not belonging to that group by a particular test/measure (e.g., Test of Memory Malingering [TOMM]). For example, a specificity of .45 indicates that 45% of the people who do not belong to the poor effort group (i.e., adequate effort group) were correctly identified by the TOMM as providing adequate effort. Specificity is calculated by dividing the number of people identified by the test as not belongingto the poor effort group (i.e., adequate effort group) who actually belong to that group (i.e., test negative, target behavior absent) by the number of people who belong in...
Further Reading
- Lange, R. T., & Lippa, S. M. (2017). Sensitivity and specificity should never be interpreted in isolation without consideration of other clinical utility metrics. The Clinical Neuropsychologist, 1–14. [Epub ahead of print].Google Scholar
- Retzlaff, P. D., & Gibertini, M. (1994). Neuropsychometric issues and problems. In R. D. Vanderploeg (Ed.), Clinician’s guide to neuropsychological assessment (pp. 195–209). Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
- Slick, D. J. (2006). Psychometrics in neuropsychological assessment. In E. Strauss, E. M. S. Sherman, & O. Spreen (Eds.), A compendium of neuropsychological tests: Administration, norms, and commentary (pp. 3–43). New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar