ABCT Clinical Assessment Series – serie

Practitioner's Guide to Empirically-Based Measures to Depression, the first volume in a series of clinical assessment handbooks, is intended to guide clinicians and researchers in choosing practical tools relevant for clinical assessment, intervention, and/or research in this area. This volume provides critical overviews of key assessment issues and available assessment tools in depression. It provides summary tables comparing and contrasting different instruments in terms of their time requirements, suitability, costs, administration, reliability, and validity. These `quick view grids' provide a rapid method of identifying and comparing potentially useful measures. Sample copies of 25 instruments in the public domain are included; for instruments commercially available, samples of instrument content and information about how to purchase them are provided. This remarkable compendium of information should serve as a valuable resource to practicing clinicians and to researchers who wish to develop state-of-the-science assessment strategies for clinical problems and to make informed choices about which devices best suit their purposes.

Despite the high prevalence (as many as one in four) and severe impairment often associated with anxiety disorders, people who suffer are often undiagnosed, and may fail to receive appropriate treatment. The purpose of this volume is to provide a single resource that contains information on almost all of the measures that have demonstrated usefulness in measuring the presence and severity of anxiety and related disorders. This remarkable compendium includes reviews of more than 200 instruments for measuring anxiety-related constructs in adults. These measures are summarized in `quick view grids' which clinicians will find invaluable. Seventy-five of the most popular instruments are reprinted and a glossary of frequently used terms is provided. This and the companion volumes in the series are written for practitioners who wish to make their assessment practices more systematic, want to have assessment devices readily available, and want to expand their assessment practices with the most up-to-date approaches.

This work provides clinicians and researchers with reviews of a compendium of instruments used for assessing children's and adolescent's behaviour, social, or attentional problems in the school setting. Although the primary focus is on the evaluation of problems manifested in the school setting, many instruments reviewed are multi-informant and are used to evaluate children across settings. All instruments reviewed have psychometric support. The contemporary assessment of children's behaviour problems has moved away from exclusive reliance on rating scale interview methods to functional assessment of children in the classroom. As such, a chapter on functional assessment, which refers to identifying the function of the behaviour with regard to reinforcement contingencies, is included in the book. Also included is a chapter on curriculum based assessment methods for evaluating academic skill deficits relative to the child's curriculum. This chapter is included given the increased risk of academic weaknesses for children with behaviour or attentional problems.

Social skills are at the core of mental health, so much so that deficits in this area are a criterion of clinical disorders, across both the developmental spectrum and the DSM. The Practitioner’s Guide to Empirically-Based Measures of Social Skills gives clinicians and researchers an authoritative resource reflecting the ever growing interest in social skills assessment and its clinical applications. This one-of-a-kind reference approaches social skills from a social learning perspective, combining conceptual background with practical considerations, and organized for easy access to material relevant to assessment of children, adolescents, and adults. The contributors’ expert guidance covers developmental and diversity issues, and includes suggestions for the full range of assessment methods, so readers can be confident of reliable, valid testing leading to appropriate interventions.Key features of the Guide:An official publication of the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive TherapiesDescribes empirically-based assessment across the lifespan.Provides in-depth reviews of nearly 100 measures, their administration and scoring, psychometric properties, and references. Highlights specific clinical problems, including substance abuse, aggression, schizophrenia, intellectual disabilities, autism spectrum disorders, and social anxiety. Includes at-a-glance summaries of all reviewed measures.Offers full reproduction of more than a dozen measures for children, adolescents, and adults, e.g. the Interpersonal Competence Questionnaire and the Teenage Inventory of Social Skills.As social skills assessment and training becomes more crucial to current practice and research, the Practitioner’s Guide to Empirically-Based Measures of Social Skills is a steadyresource that clinicians, researchers, and graduate students will want close at hand.

Children’s display of unacceptable behavior in the school setting, school violence, academic underachievement, and school failure represent a cluster of problems that touches all aspects of society.