CLINICAL ASSESMENT

By: Sharmaine Furing Rago

An evaluation of a patient's physical condition and prognosis based on information gathered from physical and laboratory examinations and the patient's medical history.

clinical assessment = health assessment,

Is a documented process that is used to evaluate and diagnose individuals’ overall well-being, whether mental, physical, or both. Evaluators tend to use standard rubrics and checklists for quantifying health, wellness, and fitness.

CLINICAL INTERVIEWS

Clinical interviewing can be defined as the process of evaluating a client or potential employee to reveal important information regarding his current condition or personality. It is mainly used in psychiatry and other medical fields to gather details about the individual's past and current strengths and weaknesses

• Interview time line:

Plan the interview for a minimum of two interviews, approximately 2-3+ hours.

Actual names and identifying information are fictitious. Interview I Gather basic family information (data) (1 ¾

hrs).Score test and develop additional questions for session

II.Interview II is for completing missing information and

asking clarifying questions that emerged after session I interview (1 ¾ hrs). 1

• Identify person for case project (index person) – Person cannot be a relative, close friend or significant

other.– Ask your index person to assist you with the project for

your personality class.– Confidentiality must be preserved – names will not be

released under any conditions.– Actual names and identifying information are fictitious.– Do not release results of your case study to the index

person.

• Arrange for a comfortable place to conduct your personality interview. –The place should be free of

distractions.–Private. –Two sessions will be necessary –

approximately 3 + hours.

The 1st interview questions!•

What’s your name and how did you get it?

•  How many are in your family? What number are you?

•  If you could be an animal, what would you be, and why?

•  If you could travel anywhere in the world, where would you go?

•  What do you most like to do for fun?

•  In one word, what is the most important thing to you and why?

•  What is your favorite thing to eat? When did you first eat it?

•  Who was the most influential person/people in your life and what

did you learn from them?

• The 2nd interview relationship questions: • Have subject rate Family members on a chart from 1-10, with 10 being

close and 1 being distant. •

– How close is client/person to father & mother?– How distant is client/person to father & mother?– Is the relationship between parents conflictual?– Is the relationship between grandparent(s) conflictual?– Is the relationship between siblings conflictual?– Identify the family relationships that are in conflict?– Is the client/person relationship cut off or distant from family?– Does the client/person relationship seem enmeshed? Fused or to close?

• Who has the parenting role and responsibilities? How effective is that person in providing a safe, stable environment?

• Are there any family members who have had a mental illness of any kind? Who are they and how are they related to client/person?

• What kind of treatment was helpful for them or available to them?• Who does everyone in the family go to when he or she need help or

someone to talk to?• What family members does client/person see as the “strong one?” The

weak one? The one with all of the problems?• Your appraisal of subject’s perception of Self

BEHAVIORAL ASSESSMENT• Behavioral assessments help predict future

behaviors. These tools offer insights into whether an employee will succeed in his new job or an offender will break more laws. Educators, parents and childcare specialists rely on various instruments to delve into behavioral or developmental issues among children. Professionals who use these mechanisms offer various tips for behavioral assessment tests, most notably to use only trained specialists in administering and interpreting results to avoid any misleading conclusions.

INTELLIGENCE ASSESSMENT

INTELLIGENCE ASSESSMENT• Intelligence assessment tools can be used

alone or in conjunction with other assessments tools to accurately test for intelligence. With that said, these are only tools that can be used to gain some insight into the psyche and different types of intelligence that an individual might have. Assessment tools can be used prior to teaching and post teaching to measure learning, and they can also be used to test for general intelligence.

The Kaufman Brief Intelligence Test

The Kaufman Brief Intelligence Test measures verbal and non-verbal skills. The verbal scale measures knowledge of words, as well as their meaning, but does not require reading or spelling. It tests for crystal knowledge, or rote memorization skills, in receptive and expressive vocabulary. This scale helps to determine whether a person is able to understand the relationships between given items and also measures whether the person is able to easily form analogies. One positive aspect of the Kaufman Brief Intelligence Test is that it has remained free of gender or cultural bias. Bias in intelligence testing has questioned the reliability of olde intelligence tests.

• Emotional Intelligence Tests

• Emotional intelligence is thought by some to be the most important intelligence of them all. The theory behind this assertion is that no matter how intelligent you are in all other areas, 50% of your intelligence is emotional/social intelligence. If you receive 100% on the Wechsler but only 50% on the emotional intelligence test, it is considered a failing grade.We must communicate with others effectively, form cohesive groups, successfully lead or follow a team, or have the necessary skills to successfully communicate with others. Unlike the skills in basic intelligence, emotional intelligence is extremely hard to teach. It tends to be an inborn trait.

• Wechsler Intelligence Test• The Wechsler Intelligence test was the first IQ test designed by David

Wechsler in 1896. He paved the path for all the other psychological tests that became mainstream methods of IQ testing. Fifteen years after creating the Wechsler IQ test, he revised and renamed it the WAIS. The verbal WAIS scales, test for areas of intelligence such as persistence, vocabulary, math and digit span. The WAIS is still commonly used in schools today.

• Stanford-Binet-V Intelligence Scales• French psychologist Alfred Binet was the first person to suggest intelligence

testing in 1904 with some barbaric terminology that can be considered offensive. He used terms such as idiot, imbecile, moron and dull before the scores started to climb for an individual. His test covered areas such as verbal scales and performance scales with a number of categories in each one. For instance, in the verbal category, individuals were tested for comprehension, vocabulary and arithmetic. The performance scales included areas such as object assembly, picture completion and matrix reasoning.

PERSONALITY ASSESSMENT

• Personality assessment, the measurement of personal characteristics. Assessment is an end result of gathering information intended to advance psychological theory and research and to increase the probability that wise decisions will be made in applied settings (e.G., In selecting the most promising people from a group of job applicants). The approach taken by the specialist in personality assessment is based on the assumption that much of the observable variability in behaviour from one person to another results from differences in the extent to which individuals possess particular underlying personal characteristics (traits). The assessment specialist seeks to define these traits, to measure them objectively, and to relate them to socially significant aspects of behaviour.

• Assessment methods• Personality tests provide measures of such

characteristics as feelings and emotional states, preoccupations, motivations, attitudes, and approaches to interpersonal relations. There is a diversity of approaches to personality assessment, and controversy surrounds many aspects of the widely used methods and techniques. These include such assessments as the interview, rating scales, self-reports, personality inventories, projective techniques, and behavioral observation.

• Self-report tests

• The success that attended the use of convenient intelligence tests in providing reliable, quantitative (numerical) indexes of individual ability has stimulated interest in the possibility of devising similar tests for measuring personality. Procedures now available vary in the degree to which they achieve score reliability and convenience. These desirable attributes can be partly achieved by restricting in designated ways the kinds of responses a subject is free to make. Self-report instruments follow this strategy. For example, a test that restricts the subject to true-false answers is likely to be convenient to give and easy to score. So-called personality inventories (see below) tend to have these characteristics, in that they are relatively restrictive, can be scored objectively, and are convenient to administer. Other techniques (such as inkblot tests) for evaluating personality possess these characteristics to a lesser degree.

• Self-report personality tests are used in clinical settings in making diagnoses, in deciding whether treatment is required, and in planning the treatment to be used. A second major use is as an aid in selecting employees, and a third is in psychological research. An example of the latter case would be where scores on a measure of test anxiety—that is, the feeling of tenseness and worry that people experience before an exam—might be used to divide people into groups according to how upset they get while taking exams. Researchers have investigated whether the more test-anxious students behave differently than the less anxious ones in an experimental situation.

THANK YOU

BY: SHARMAINE RAGO