Psych Assessment

• The psychological assessment process involves referral for testing, initial assessment, scheduling of tests, evaluation proper, and writing and communicating the report.
• The best report is not functional unless it is brought to action
• Continuously communicate with the client or the source of referral for giving of feedback, further evaluation, or follow - up sessions
• The purpose of a psychological assessment report is determined by the referral source and the individual style and orientation of the practitioner.
• A case-focused report centers on the specific problems raised by the referring person, revealing unique aspects of the client and providing specific accurate descriptions, rather than portraying stereotypes.
• The creation of a case-focused report involves understanding and applying several basic principles: reader awareness, expertise, action-oriented language, differentiation, and specific recommendations.
• A case-focused report should be written with an awareness of the point of view of the intended readers, their level of expertise, their theoretical or professional orientation, the decisions they are facing, and possible interpretations they are likely to make.
• The quality of a report is enhanced if the writer is knowledgeable about the issue the client is experiencing, as it helps to increase the depth of the interpretations and provides relevant information or a general “map” of the problem area.
• A report should use action-oriented language rather than metapsychological abstractions, describing the client’s personality processes in relation to on-going specific behaviors.
• A focus on that which differentiates one person from another is important in a case-focused report, avoiding discussing what is average about the client, and emphasizing instead what is unique to this individual.
• Specific recommendations in a case-focused report need to directly relate to what specifically can be done for this client in his or her particular environment.
• The length of a psychological assessment report varies based on the purpose of the report, context, and expectations of the referral source, with a common length being five and seven single-spaced pages.
• The style (or flavor) of a psychological assessment report is influenced primarily by the training and orientation of the examiner, with general Report Writing Approaches including Literary, Clinical, and Scientific.
• The importance of the Behavioral Observation section is relative and extremely varied.
• When presenting all these results, the main findings of the evaluation should be presented in the form of integrated hypotheses.
• For the Summary, restate your purpose of evaluation and the answers to these referral questions in a concise manner.
• For Socio-Emotional Functioning, use a domain-focused model and integrate results from the battery of objective personality tests (such as MMPI or 16PF) and projective tests (Rorschach, TAT, HTP, KFD, HT, RISB/SSCT) plus interview data, MSE and behavioral observations.
• BAD: “The client should begin psychotherapy”
• BAD: “Special education is recommended”
• GOOD: “special education two hours a day, emphasizing exercises in auditory sequencing and increasing immediate recall for verbally relevant information.
• Behavioral Observation includes Personal Appearance, Non-verbal behavior, Verbal Behavior, Mood and Affect, Vision and Hearing, Motor Behavior.
• For the recommendations, provide clear, practical, and obtainable, and should relate directly to the purpose of the report.
• The total time required for the evaluation includes the duration required for each test, the clinical interview or mental status examination, relevant records used in the assessment, and the duration of the evaluation.
• GOOD: “individual therapy focusing on the following areas: increased assertiveness, relaxation techniques for reducing anxiety, and increased awareness of the self-defeating patterns he/she creates in relationships.”
• Test results and analysis should be kept concise, specific, and relevant.
• The use of a mental status examination is a movement away from concrete descriptions of behaviors to inferences about these behaviors.
• Be highly-specific in your recommendations (Armengol, 2001; Finn et al., 2001).
• If actual test scores are included, use standard scores rather than raw scores; most readers appreciate percentile scores.
• Literary reports use everyday language, are creative, and often dramatic, but can be imprecise and prone to exaggeration.
• Hypothesis-Oriented Model focuses heavily on answering specific questions asked by the referral source, tends to be highly focused, well integrated, and avoids any extraneous material, but may appear that a practitioner is a technician rather than a clinician.
• A report writer should generally avoid adhering too closely to the raw data, but there may be instances when it may be useful to include raw data or even to describe the tests.
• Domain-Oriented Model discusses the client in relation to specific topics, giving the reader a good feel for the person as a whole, but may provide too much information, thus overloading the reader.
• Misinterpretations can result from vague and ambiguously worded sentences that place incorrect or misleading emphasis on a client’s behavior.
• Professional reports are characterized by short, commonly used words, a variety of sentence construction to maintain reader’s interest, short paragraphs focusing on a single concept, and similar concepts going together.
• A report should provide information that will be most helpful in responding to the referral question and meeting the needs of the client, balancing between providing too much or too little information, and between being too cold or too dramatic.
• There is an extremely wide range of topics or domains that clinicians may decide to discuss in their reports, with the two most common topics being cognitive functioning and socio-emotional functioning.
• Examiner and the referral source must clarify and agree on the purpose of the evaluation before the examiner can decide whether certain information should be elaborated in depth, briefly mentioned, or deleted.
• A report that combines accuracy, clarity, and readability is known as the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association 5th ed., 2001.
• Test-by-Test Interpretation is a report organization that presents the results of each test, one at a time, enabling the reader to know how the clinician made his or her inferences, but reflecting a failure to integrate the data and possible inconsistencies among tests.
• On stating conclusions and recommendations, it is essential that they indicate their relative degree of certainty.