Assessment in counseling : practice and applications

297 Pages·2018·3.469 MB·English

by  Balkin, Richard S.

Assessment in Counseling

Assessment in
Counseling
Practice and Applications
Richard S. Balkin
University of Mississippi
Gerald A. Juhnke
The University of Texas at San Antonio
1
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To the students who initially came in to my assessment class thinking “Ick!”
and ended up loving it! — RSB

Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
1. The Role of Assessment in Counseling  1
2. Case Studies, Progress Notes, and Classification Systems  15
3. Fundamentals of Assessment  48
4. Current Standards for Validity  77
5. Current Standards for Reliability  88
6. How to Choose an Assessment Instrument  107
7. Conducting an Initial Interview  120
8. Multicultural and Special Population Assessment Issues in Counseling  138
9. Fundamentals of Ability Assessment  151
10. Fundamentals of Career Assessment  178
11. Marriage, Substance Abuse, and Suicide Assessment  191
12. Fundamentals of Interpretation in Assessment  219
13. Assessment of Accountability in Counseling  234
Appendix A  251
Appendix B  253
References  257
Index  267

Preface
Our approach to this book was to create a text that would emphasize assessment as a skill for
professional counselors. When I teach assessment, as well as other courses that emphasize
research methods and statistics, I often find students overwhelmed with the mathematical
concepts and quite anxious about the coursework. Too often students experience assess-
ment 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.
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, prac-
tical component. However, this practical component often gets lost in the application of
the skills and use of instruments that heavily rely on psychometric properties.
Statistics are an influential component to assessment in counseling. If you are like
many students and get mired in the mathematical concepts, I encourage you to take a step
back and relax. Yes, there will be some math discussed and applied in this textbook, but we
hope you will find that the explanation of the computations are provided to emphasize the
process, as opposed to focusing on only the product. In my experience, most counseling
students who express some intimidation with the statistical concepts do so as a result of
past experience. My hope is that you will see these concepts expressed in a new or different
light with focus on application, rather than the mere computation.
My coauthor and I worked hard to focus on the application of the theoretical and
measurement concepts of assessment in counseling. We attempted to use a conversational
style of writing and introduce three case studies that we follow throughout the text. This is
different from other textbooks that also present similar principles but do not demonstrate
the application of said principles. In addition, 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