The present study attempts to subject certain aspects of the clinical judgments of experienced psychiatric social workers to research 7 3 9 ) . Specifically, we were interested in determining whether the social work staff of a community child guidance clinic that had worked together for a minimum of four years, would show any significant amount of agreement with one another as well as with an objective personality questionnaire when asked to rate the personality traits of mothers whose children were found to be in need of psychotherapy.
The profile sheet of the 16 Personality Factor Questionnaire was used as a rating device in order to accomplish the initial task. Since the 16 P. F. test (l) measures the major dimensions of personality in rating media and in the questionnaire realm, it was believed to be especially appropriate for our purposes(2). One advantage of this method is that it insures the fact that clinical judgments are confined to predicting validly established personality factors(lO).
'The author is grateful to the entire social work staff of the clinic for their cooperation, and to Mr. T. Douglas Ilaupt for his assistance in the computation of statistics reported in this study.
1Mrs.