Bridge or Barrier: Elements of Empowering Assessment Feedback

Psychologists have the difficult charge of translating the technical results of psychological evaluations into understandable pieces of information for all participants. In the process of feedback sessions, participants might need time to grieve or time to reorient themselves to the facts of the testing results. The psychologist’s role is then more than simply to present statistics, but it is to create a connection between the participants and evaluation results that present a clear path forward for the child/adolescent. The purpose of this chapter is to equip psychologists with the skills to provide feedback sessions that create a bridge between the participants’ current understandings of the child/adolescent to the information provided in the results, so that they can begin to move forward and care for the child/adolescent well. Therefore, the Integrative Framework for Empowering Feedback intentionally addresses the use of language and visualizations in consideration of the participants’ (a) culture, (b) stages of grief, and (c) stages of change to empower rather than confuse or overwhelm participants. The current chapter builds on the concepts of crafting a useful and understandable report to equip psychologists with the skills and strategies necessary to organize empowering feedback sessions for all stakeholders.