ABSTRACT
Behavioral assessment is an evolving psychological assessment paradigm whose concepts and methods are derived from applied and experimental behavior analysis, learning, and cognitive-behavioral construct systems (Bellack & Hersen, 1998; Haynes & O’Brien, 2000; Mash & Terdal, 1997; Shapiro & Kratochwill, 2000). The behavioral assessment paradigm presumes that judgments about a client, such as identification of the client’s most important behavior problems and their causes, are most likely to be valid when the clinician adopts a scholarly, data-based approach to clinical assessment. That is, clinical judgments are most likely to be valid when the clinician uses methods of assessment that have been validated and are relevant for persons similar to the client and when the clinician collects information that might contravene his or her hypotheses about the client (Garb, 1998; Nezu & Nezu, 1989).
