Clinical Assement

Assignment #1

The definition of assessment in the textbook is “simply the collecting of relevant information in an effort to reach a conclusion.” Therefore clinical assessment is used to determine how and why a person is behaving abnormally and how that person may be helped. Clinical assessment is also a useful tool to evaluate a person’s progress in treatment. If the treatment is not working out over time then after being evaluated the treatment can be changed. There are many different techniques and tools that have been developed with clinical assessment and they fall into three categories: clinical interviews, tests, and observations.

A clinical interview is a face to face encounter. The clinician is able to observe a person’s reactions to what they say and what they do. Something that the clinician would be able to do let’s say over the phone or internet chat. The clinician is also able to observe the way the person presents themselves. More than just what the person seeking help is saying is being observed. Interviews can either be unstructured or structured. The difference between the two is simple. In an unstructured interview the clinician asks open ended questions while in a structured interview the clinicians asks prepared questions. By asking open ended questions the clinician is hoping to retrieve information that was not anticipated before the interview.

Clinical tests are devices for gathering information about a few aspects of a person’s psychological functioning, from which broader information about the person can be inferred. There are more than 500 clinical tests that are currently in the use throughout the United States. Clinicians use these six types of tests most often: projective tests, personality inventories, response inventories, psychophysiological tests, neurological and neuropsychological tests, and intelligence tests.

There are three different techniques used in clinical observations. The first technique used is...