Principles and Practice of Behavioral Assessment

Description

Behavioral assessment is a psychological assessment paradigm that emphasizes empirically supported, multimethod and multi-informant assessment of specific, observable behaviors and contemporaneous causal variables in the natural environment. The behavioral assessment paradigm stresses the use of well-validated assessment instruments and assumptions that social/environmental, cognitive, and physiological variables are often important sources of behavior variance. The behavioral assessment paradigm has had a major influence on the field of psychological assessment. It has affected the way research on the causes of behavior disorders is conducted, the way treatment processes and outcomes are evaluated, and the way treatment decisions are made. The goal of this book is to present the characteristics and underlying assumptions of the behavioral assessment paradigm and to show how they affect the strategies of behavioral assessment. Although all of the concepts and strategies discussed in this book are applicable in the research, this book focuses on the use of behavioral assessment to guide clinical judgements. Front Matter....Pages i-xviii Front Matter....Pages 1-1 Background, Characteristics, and History....Pages 3-24 Current Status and Applications....Pages 25-40 Functional Psychological Assessment and Clinical Judgment....Pages 41-60 Goals....Pages 61-83 Front Matter....Pages 85-85 Scholarly, Hypothesis-Testing, and Time-Series Assessment Strategies....Pages 87-107 Idiographic and Nomothetic Assessment....Pages 109-126 Specificity of Variables....Pages 127-139 Assumptions About the Nature of Behavior Problems....Pages 141-158 Basic Concepts of Causation....Pages 159-170 Concepts of Causation in the Behavioral Assessment Paradigm....Pages 171-197 Psychometric Foundations of Behavioral Assessment....Pages 199-222 Front Matter....Pages 223-223 Principles and Strategies of Behavioral Observation....Pages 225-263 Clinical Case Formulation....Pages 265-292 Back Matter....Pages 293-348