Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. The Role of Assessment in Counseling -- 2. Case Studies, Progress Notes, and Classification Systems -- 3. Fundamentals of Assessment -- 4. Current Standards for Validity -- 5. Current Standards for Reliability -- 6. How to Choose an Assessment Instrument -- 7. Conducting an Initial Interview -- 8. Multicultural and Special Population Assessment Issues in Counseling -- 9. Environmental Assessment -- 10. Fundamentals of Ability Assessment -- 11. Fundamentals of Career and Personality Assessment -- 12. Marriage, Substance Abuse, and Suicide Assessment -- 13. Fundamentals of Interpretation in Assessment -- 14. Assessment of Accountability in Counseling -- Appendix A Area Under the Normal Curve -- Appendix B Integrative Summary for Kennedy L. Smith -- References -- Index.

"Too often students experience assessment courses, and subsequently the textbooks used for the course, as a statistics-heavy class accompanied by an encyclopedia of a variety of assessments. We take a different approach. Our approach to this book was to create a text that would emphasize assessment as a skill for professional counselors. We emphasize the skills used in assessment and believe that once you understand the skills you can apply these skills across a broad range of assessment instruments and strategies. Assessment, like most core areas of counseling, has a theoretical basis and a pertinent, practical component. However, this practical component often gets lost in the application of the skills and use of instruments that heavily rely on psychometric properties. Instead of introducing you to a plethora of instruments, we select seminal measures that you are likely to comes across and use in the profession. We do not focus on types of assessments typically not used by professional counselors, such as projective measures. The instruments we discuss are commonly used in professional counseling but by no means exhaustive. But through the use of this text and course content you will have the skills to search, select, and administer the type of assessment instruments that you deem helpful for your practice as a professional counselor, regardless of your specialization. Through this format, you will, we hope, see examples of assessment principles that may be applied to a variety of settings. Our goal is for this textbook to serve as a guide for administering, scoring, interpreting, and communicating assessment results"-- Provided by publisher.

Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.