ABSTRACT
Assessment of an older adult's everyday functioning is often necessary to help determine their ability to live independently, and is required to diagnose dementia. There are a variety of approaches to assessing daily living skills, including self-report, informant report, and performance-based measures. Performance-based instruments allow examiners to directly observe an older adult's behavior, and can either measure multiple functional domains in one battery, or focus on a single functional domain (e.g., driving, medication management, financial management, food shopping, or preparation). This chapter reviews some of the more commonly used and cited clinical tools that neuropsychologists may encounter for the assessment of functional ability in a geriatric population.
