ABSTRACT
Commenting on the state of the art in assessing young children, Malcom (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 schoolage children. With regard to social-emotional assessment technology for young children, the lag in technical adequacy appears to be more pronounced (Merrell, 1996a). The specic difculties in conducting effective social-emotional assessments with young children are many and varied but can be summed up in general as follows:
Despite these and other challenges inherent in assessing the social and emotional behavior of young children, there have been some encouraging developments in this area. There also is an increasing need for school psychologists, clinical child psychologists, and early childhood special education diagnosticians to provide services to young children and their families, including comprehensive assessment services (Merrell, 1996a). This chapter serves a particularly important purpose as a resource for social-emotional assessment of young children. Many of the other chapters are relevant to this topic, but none is designed specically to address assessment of young children as this chapter is.
