Clinical assessment involves evaluating a patient's physical and mental condition to diagnose issues and plan treatment. It is a multi-step process that includes gathering information from tests, interviews, records, and examinations. The psychologist compiles a case history to understand the patient's life and determine diagnoses and treatment. Key steps are deciding what to assess, setting goals, selecting evaluation methods and standards, collecting data, making decisions, and communicating findings in a report. The goal is to use the assessment to make meaningful decisions that can impact patients' lives.

1. CLINICAL
ASSESSMENT
STEPS IN THE ASSESSMENT PROCESS

2. CLINICAL ASSESSMENT
• Clinical assessment is a way of diagnosing and planning treatment for a patient
that involves evaluating someone in order to figure out what is wrong
• An evaluation of a patient's physical condition and prognosis based on informati
on gathered from physical and laboratory
examinations and the patient's medical history is a process in clinical
assessment.

3. MALONEY AND WARD (1976) OFFER THAT CLINICAL
ASSESSMENT:
• Frequently uses tests
• Typically does not involved defined procedures or steps
• Contributes to some decision process to some problem, often by redefining the
problem, breaking the problem down into smaller pieces, or highlighting some
part(s) of the problem
• Requires the examiner to consider, evaluate, and integrate the data
• Produces results that cannot be evaluated solely on psychometric grounds
• Clinical Assessment is less routine and inflexible, more individualized.

4. THE PURPOSE OF A PSYCHOLOGIST IN CLINICAL
ASSESSMENT
• Psychologists conducting assessments are like detectives trying to solve a case.
• The assessment requires a gathering of information from multiple sources, from
written tests, personal interviews, job history records, and reports and records
from other physicians, therapists, and counselors. T
• he clinical psychologist compiles an entire “case history” or in-depth story of a
person’s inner and outer life, a sort of journey into the intricacies of psyche and
behaviors.
• Past and present life situations are also considered.
• The assessment provides the psychologist a comprehensive picture of the
client's life, which helps in determining the diagnosis and course of treatment.

5. STEPS IN THE ASSESSMENT PROCESS
• STEP 1: DECIDING WHAT IS BEING ASSESSED
• The assessment process begins with a series of questions. Is there
a significant psychological problem? What is the nature
of this person's problem? Is the problem primarily one of
the emotion, thought, or behavior? What are possible causes of
the problem? What is the course of the problem likely to be if it
goes untreated? What type of treatment is likely to be the most helpful?
These questions come in part
from the client and are called the "referral questions”questions that led the client
to refer to the psychologist.

6. STEP 2: DETERMINING THE GOALS OF ASSESMENT
The second step in the process of clinical assessment is
the formulation of the psychologist's goal in a
particular case. Once again, psychologists are confronted with
a number of choices as they carry out the assessment process.
Goals may include diagnostic classification, determination of
the severity of a problem, risk screening for future problems
and evaluation of the effects of treatment, and prediction
about the likelihood of certain types of future behavior.

7. STEP 3: SELECTING STANDARDS FOR MAKING DECISIONS
• Knowing what to measure is only part of the process of assessment.
A psychologist must also know what to do with the information once it
is collected.
• Making decisions about the information is essential, and decisions and
judgments require points of reference for comparison.
Standards are used to determine if a problem exists, how severe a problem is,
and whether the individual has evidenced improvement over a specified period
of time.
• Comparisons can be made to standards that involve other people (normative st
andards) or to the self at other points in time (self-referent standards).

8. • When working with an individual, a psychologist is drawing onthe idiographic tra
ditions. This process
involves the discovery of what is unique about this person given his or
her history, current personality structure, and present environment conditions.
• In arriving at impression the individual however the psychologist is frequently
required to make judgments about this person in comparison to most other
people. In doing so, the psychologist draws on the nomothetic tradition of laws
and rules that apply to the behavior of people in general.

9. STEP 4: COLLECTING ASSESSMENT DATA
• As psychologists make decisions about which aspects of the person
environment system are most
relevant to measure; they must also decide which of many methods will be used to a
ssess the targets that have been selected.
• These choices include the use of structured or unstructured clinical interviews,
reviews of the individual's history from school or medical records, measurements of
physiological functioning, a wide array of psychological tests self –reports
• Interviews can be relatively open-ended, following the preferences or style of
the individual psychologist, or highly structured in which a series of
questions are asked in a prescribed manner and order regardless of who administers
the interview.

10. Literally hundreds of psychological
tests have been developed, most of which are administered by a psychologist to a client
on an individual basis; a smaller number are administered in a group format.
• Psychological tests include measures of intelligence assessments of neuro-
psychological functioning, objective tests of personality,and projective methods of ass
essing personality.
• Self-report measures have been designed to assess symptoms of specific problems
such as depression, stressful life events, current concerns and problems, or
perceptions of relationships with others.

11. STEP 5: MAKING DECISIONS
• The information obtained in
the psychological assessment process is valuable only to the extent that it can be
used in making important decisions about the person or persons who are the focus
of assessment.
• The goals of assessment--diagnosis,
screening, prediction, and evaluation of intervention—determine the types of
decisions that are made. The decisions that are made on the basis of psychological
assessments can have profound effects
on people's lives. The process of making decisions is complex and
the stakes are high. Therefore, it is important to understand the
factors that influence the decisions
and judgments made by clinical psychologists and ways
to optimize the quality of these decisions

12. STEP 6: COMMUNICATING THE INFORMATION
• After collecting information that is relevant to the evaluation of an individual and
the environments in which she or he functions, scoring the measures that were used
, and interpreting the scores, the psychologist is faced with the final task of clinical
assessment: communicating this information and interpretations to the interested
parties.
• This communication typically takes the form of a written psychological report that is
shared with the client, and professionals (physicians, teachers, and other
mental health professionals), a court of law, or family members who are responsible
for the client.
• The challenges for psychologists in conveying assessment information are many,
including the need to be accurate, to provide an explanation of
the basis for their judgments, and to communicate free of technical jargon.