Conducting Psychological Assessment: A Guide for Practitioners

Conducting Psychological Assessment: A Guide for Practitioners

A. Jordan Wright

Language: English

Pages: 528

ISBN: 0470536756

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


A Valuable Guide to the Entire Process of Psychological Assessment

Carefully working through all the phases of assessment, including integrating, conceptualizing, test selection, administering, scoring, and report writing, Conducting Psychological Assessment provides clinicians with a step-by-step methodology for conducting skilled individual assessments, from beginning to end.

Unlike most guides to assessment, this book addresses the critical steps that follow administration, scoring, and interpretation—namely the integration of the data into a fully conceptualized report. Rich with case studies that illustrate every major point, this text provides a coherent structure for the entire process, taking into account the imperfection of both clinical intuition and specific psychological tests.

Conducting Psychological Assessment presents practitioners with an accessible framework to help make the process of psychological assessment quicker, easier, and more efficient. It offers a model designed to ensure that assessors provide ethical and competent services and make useful contributions to the lives of the individuals they assess.

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the type(s) of substance, the onset of use (both dates and circumstances), the length of time and duration of use, the amount of use, and any previous treatments for use. It is also important to ascertain whether the individual feels that his or her use of substances has caused any type of impact, positive or negative, on his or her life. Additionally, attitudes about using and quitting can be extremely useful later on in the assessment process. For example, an individual who abuses alcohol but

easily identify what the data are saying about the emotional world of the individual, for example, but after assigning these CH004.indd 101 11/4/10 10:55:52 AM 102 conducting psychological assessment pieces of evidence a common label (i.e., “emotional stuff ”), when you look at these data all at once, a more specific theme may emerge. Other domains that commonly help themes emerge include information about the interpersonal world of the individual, how the person feels about himself or

who he is as a person and how he deals with the stress of his family and home situation is the fact that he spends much energy keeping his emotions tightly constricted. Although it would be difficult, an adolescent who could process his or her feelings more freely and perhaps use them to make his or her needs known to others around him or her may fare better with the turbulent family life. Thus, we will use emotional restriction as the diathesis, with all the other themes as outcomes of the

CH005.indd 145 11/4/10 11:01:20 AM 146 conducting psychological assessment get confusing. It is best to keep clear in your mind exactly what is present and ongoing and what is in the past. Throughout the report, whenever discussing what the individual being assessed reported, use the past tense for the fact that he or she reported it in the past. However, you should evaluate the content of whatever was reported for its own proper tense. That is, if whatever was reported is ongoing, it should

section on “Motivation” (and should be titled as such). Having used measures of malingering and motivation, you will make a presentation of whether or not poor motivation or the potential for faking were likely factors affecting the testing. As with the 1 It should be noted that neuropsychological screening refers to the use of a battery of cognitive tests to identify areas of neuropsychological impairment. Neuropsychological testing is much more detailed and targeted, and it both takes much

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