ABSTRACT
This chapter is composed of six independent sections, each elaborating an aspect of individualized assessment that was only mentioned in earlier chapters. The first section briefly expands the point that although assessment may be collaborative and interventional, it is not psychotherapy. The second section is playful and yet probably more profoundly foundational than any other presentation in the book. It invites the reader to explore reality as it evolves in a realm between perceiver and perceived, and to discover how being attuned to that reality allows language to speak beyond the constraints of everyday positivism (that is, the assumption that only physical things are real, that they are clearly separate and distinct, and that all practical knowledge consists of facts about these things). The third section is also playful in form, but addresses the more mundane (although timely) subject of program evaluation. Specifically, an allegory illustrates that just as a human-science approach to individual assessment allows integration of qualitative and quantitative data, so too the same approach can be taken in program evaluation. The next section is a reminder that individualized assessment requires not just theory, techniques, and natural science research, but also research carried out within a human-science orientation. Illustrations are provided for such research on how patients live their low-back injury, on being in privacy, and on being criminally victimized. The privacy findings and then the last two sections address the special relations that occur during individualized assessment; specifically, the relation between assessor and client, their relation to the assessment events, and the client’s relation to his or her life as it is explored during the assessment. These relations—rapport, shared privacy, and witnessed intimacy—turn out to be quite different from what they are traditionally thought to be. As with the other chapters, this one ends with a question-response section, this time broken into subsections for each of the six topics.
