Domain-general and domain-specific developmental assessments: Do they measure the same thing?

Abstract

The concept of epistemological development is useful in psychological assessment only insofar as instruments can be designed to measure it consistently, reliably, and without bias. In the psychosocial domain, most traditional stage assessment systems rely on a process of matching concepts in a scoring manual generated from a limited number of construction cases, and thus suffer from bias introduced by an over-dependence on particular content. In contrast, the Hierarchical Complexity Scoring System (HCSS) employs criteria for assessing the hierarchical complexity of texts that are independent of specific conceptual content. This paper examines whether the HCSS and a conventional stage assessm..