ABSTRACT
Commenting on the state of the art in assessing young children, Malcolm (1993) stated, “A request to assess a child who has not reached school age often strikes fear in the hearts of psychoeducational diagnosticians” (p. 113). This statement may not be true for all clinicians, but it goes right to the center of the issue: there are often substantial challenges in assessing young children. In commenting on some of these challenges, Bracken (1987, 1994) noted that the technical adequacy of assessment measures for preschool-age children tends to lag behind that of measures for school-age children. With regard to social-emotional assessment technology for young children, the lag in technical adequacy appears to be more pronounced (Merrell, 1996a). The specific difficulties in conducting effective social-emotional assessments with young children are many and varied but can be summed up in general as follows:
• In relation to what is available for use with school-age children and adolescents, there is substantially less assessment instrumentation and fewer specifically developed methods for assessing social and emotional behavior of young children.
