Clinical Assessment: Understanding Abnormal Behavior and Informing Treatment

Clinical Assessment: How and Why Does the Client Behave Abnormally? - Assessment - Collection of relevant information to reach a conclusion, idiographic information - Clinical assessment - Information used to determine whether, how, and why a person is behaving Abnormally and how that person may be helped. - Idiographic; program based - Hundreds of clinical assessment tools have been developed and fall into three categories - Clinical interviews - Tests - Observations - Characteristics of assessment tools - To be useful, assessment tools must be standardized and have clear reliability and Validity - Standardization - Standardizing aa technique involves setting up common steps to be followed Whenever it is administered - One must standardize administration, scoring, and interpretation - Reliability: The consistency of an assessment measure - A good tool will always yield the same results in the same situation - Two main types - Test-retest reliability: Yields the same results every time it is given to

To the same people - Interrater reliability: Different judges independently agree on how to Score and interpret a particular tool. - Validity: The accuracy of a tool ’ s results - An assessment tool must accurately measure what it is supposed to measure - Three specific types - Face validity - Predictive validity - Concurrent validity - Clinical interviews - Face-to-face encounter - Basic background data gathered with specific theoretical focus - Unstructured or structured - Mental status exam - Clinical interview limitations - Lack of validity or accuracy - Interviewer bias or mistakes in judgement - Lack of reliability - Clinical tests - Used to gather information about psychological functioning from which Broader information is inferred. - Projective tests require client interpretation of vague or ambiguous stimuli

Or open-ended instruction; psychodynamic orientation - Rorschach test - Thematic Appreciation Test - Sentence-completion test - Drawings