Formal Assessment Procedures

INDIVIDUAL AND CULTURAL HIGHLIGHT 11.2send parents to the waiting room with an assignment or questionnaire . If you need a direct interview with parents, young clients can be given drawing assignments or questionnaires to complete in the waiting room. In most cases, it is useful to spend individual time with an adolescent and then to have parents return for 5 to 10 minutes at the end of the time to review therapy or follow up procedures .

THE BODY After obtaining child and parent versions of problem areas and possible treatment goals, it is time to shift to the body of the interview. Depending on developmental and temperamental factors, children are more or less verbal. Therefore, anyone planning to communicate fully and effectively with children must develop and be comfortable with a wide variety of methods. Textbooks, graduate classes, workshops, and even core emphases in graduate programs focus exclusively on assessment and therapy strategies with children. An effective child interviewer is familiar with principles and procedures far beyond what is included in this brief chapter .

User Friendly Assessment and Information Gathering Strategies The purpose of formal assessment or evaluation procedures is to obtain information about client functioning that may be used to make diagnoses and treatment recommendations and/or facilitate therapy . While many mental health professionals use traditional, formal assessment procedures when interviewing children, many do not.

Those who do not sometimes have negative attitudes toward assessment or view formal assessment as interfering with the therapy process and with understanding the “whole life of the child” rather than narrow diagnostic aspects .