Writing with the Whole Child in Mind: Social-Emotional/Personality Assessment

Social-emotional/personality assessment measures development, functioning, and growth of children within the contexts of developmental, social, environmental, and interpersonal variables. This chapter addresses using multiple assessments, methods, and informants to provide data to enable crafting a report that describes the child’s strengths, weaknesses, and emotional concerns across situations and settings, as opposed to a listing of scores for each measure in isolation. Practitioners should be familiar with a variety of instruments (i.e., broadband and single construct) and be willing to expand their repertoire as new instruments become available. The use of jargon within the written report should be limited, to provide an understandable report for parents and teachers. This is accomplished by integrating across methods, tests, and informants according to constructs (rather than by the scale names of specific tests used) to drive the generation of recommendations for clinical and school settings. Although the task is complex, a case example is provided with instructions to guide data integration, reader-friendly description of constructs, and the development of recommendations.