Wittman (1941) developed a prognosis scale for predicting outcome of electroshock therapy in schizophrenia, which consisted of 30 variables rated from social history and psychiatric examination. The predictors ranged from semi-objective matters (such as duration of psychosis) to highly interpretive judgments (such as anal-erotic vs. oral-erotic character). None of the predictor variables was psychometric. Numerical weights were not based on the sample statistics but were assigned judgmentally on the basis of the frequency and relative importance ascribed to them in previous studies. We may therefore presume that the weights used here were not optimal, but with 30 variables that.
