Reading Reflection of Clinical Versus Actuarial Judgement

                          Reading Reflection of Clinical Versus Actuarial Judgement

Judgment is a cognitive process, which means the act of shaping views or making decisions after careful thought.  Because judgement comes from a person’s thought, it is highly personal. A person can not only use objective facts to conclude a judgement, but use his or her previous experience or knowledge about an issue.

In fact, clinical judgement and actuarial judgement are both professional terminologies in the medical field. The two methods are prevalently used when a psychiatrist decides whether the patient needs just psychotherapy or he/she should take some medicines. Just as I mentioned above, the judgement is subjective process depending on oneself. The results of clinical judgement are also highly subjective. Generally Speaking, the accurate clinical judgement comes from the doctors who have both intellectual and professional maturity. So the advantage of clinical judgement is that the professional must possess the knowledge of local health phenomena. The actuarial judgement, also called statistics judgement is more objective. In this paper, the human judge is eliminated and conclusions rest solely on empirically established relations between data and the condition or event of interest (p.1668). What I’m really interested is that whether both of the methods can be used in contemporary decision research.

Fortunately, I find the answer in another paper Clinical and Actuarial Judgment (Benjamin Kleinmuntz et al, 1990). In this paper, the authors indicated that the issue whether to use the “head” (clinical judgement) or “formula” (actuarial judgment) now had extended to other fields, such as medicine, engineering, auditing, polygraphy and so on, not just clinical psychology. What’s more, the dilemma they pose of using either the head or the formula is no longer the main focus of contemporary decision research. (p.146). Rather, the attention has transferred to evaluation the use of both methods in tandem. Besides, the paper also indicated that in some professional fields, such as medicine and engineering, research comparing the judgment methods is limited at best, and theorists are often reduced to educated guessing or forecasting. (p.147).