ABSTRACT
To ensure accurate identification of the client’s problems, design the most suitable intervention, and evaluate its impact on improving the wellbeing of the client, mental health professionals use interviews, questionnaires, and observational tools. This chapter provides information on how diagnostical, assessment, and monitoring instruments are utilized to ensure measurement-based care and effective intervention when working with parents with eating disorder histories and their children. Special attention is given in this chapter to digitally-delivered tools to assess parental concerns and dilemmas. The authors also discuss the importance of identifying assessment and monitoring online and smartphone-app-based tools with good psychometric qualities, such as high reliability and validity. Adapting the intervention, given client data and information before and throughout the intervention, is particularly important in a time-limited, manualized program for parents concerned about their children’s weight management and eating habits. In Parent-Based Prevention, when the therapist communicates with the parents about the results of the interviews and surveys administered, asks for clarifications, and facilitates a more open therapist–client dialogue, the semi-structured program is further personalized and made more relevant to parents and their families, thereby improving the care provided to patients in their important role as parents.
