ABSTRACT
Behavioral assessment is a primary assessment process for use with children and adolescents and is necessary for all aspects of multimethod child assessment (Merrell, 2003). For example, behavioral assessment methods are included in all four of Sattler’s'(2001) pillars of assessment: norm-referenced testing, interviews, observations, and informal assessment procedures. Surprisingly, even norm-referenced tests, such as the NEPSY: A Developmental Neuropsychological Assessment (Kemp, Kirk, & Korkman, 2001), include behavioral observation systems. McConaughy and Achenbach (2004) have developed an observational system to be administered during individualized testing. The other three pillars, interviews, observations, and various informal assessment procedures, are all techniques for gathering behavioral assessment data. Despite its broad implications and importance, there is no one universally accepted definition of or procedure for behavioral assessment. The purpose of this chapter is to describe behavioral assessment and its purposes, to explain methods of data collection, and to make procedural recommendations for data integration and interpretation. To begin to clarify the meaning of behavioral assessment, one must compare it with other assessment orientations.
Historically, there has been a distinction between behavioral and traditional assessment (Hersen, 1976; Mash & Terdal, 1988). A central assumption accounting for this distinction is that behavioral assessment requires “situational specificity.” That is, the particular target behaviors are caused by variables in the immediate settings (Shapiro, 1988). Traditional assessment, on the other hand, focuses on enduring traits resulting in consistent behavior across settings. Furthermore, traditional assessment is linked with making clinical diagnoses rather than describing behavior and its circumstances (Silva, 1993). As behavioral assessment evolves, it is becoming clear that situational specificity is a restrictive assumption. Rather, behavior in a situation can be caused by multimodal variables that are proximal, 115
distal, physiological, or intrapsychic (Haynes & O’Brien, 1990; Miller, Tansy, & Hughes,1998). As a result of the recognition of the expanding influences on observed behavior, it has been recommended that behavioral assessments measure as many of the modalities as the assessment plan will permit.There is concern, however, that behavioral assessment has become so encompassing that there are no limits to what behavior and environments need to be evaluated. To help clarify this upper limit, behavioral assessment can be contrasted with Simeonsson’s concept of qualitative-developmental assessment (Simmeonsson, Huntington, Brent, & Balant, 2001). Within his approach, like behavioral assessment, problems are thought to be idiosyncratic and complex. However, qualitative-developmental assessment, emerging from the biopsychosocial paradigm, extends focus to sensory, health, and developmental variables with the assumption of a highly integrated and dynamic social context. Thus, clinical decisions are based largely on the association of assessment data with developmental sequences. Qualitative-developmental assessment is important to the field of assessment but appears to go beyond the assumptions of behavioral assessment, which are explained next.
