With traditional clinical assessment, clinicians are often guided by the question, “What do I want to know?” As psychologists, we can tend to prioritize own interests and goals when determining an assessment’s purpose as well as the questions we attempt to answer. In doing so, we can overlook the client’s interests and priorities. It’s much less common for a clinician to revise the question of “What do I want to know?” to “What do you want to know?,” and focus the assessment around what is personally meaningful to the client. Additionally, traditional clinical assessment tends to prioritize the identification of what’s “wrong” with the client. However, our client’s interests are often not limited to insights into what is wrong; they also have an interest in identifying their strengths and adaptive traits.
Moreover, it can be easy for clinicians to overlook what it is like to be “in our client’s shoes,” and recognize just how unnerving and intimidating an assessment can be. Think about it—some mysterious person is asking several mysterious questions, administering a series of mysterious measures and tasks with mysterious activities and items–all the while, providing limited feedback along the way. This uncertainty can make assessment a frightening and overall negative experience for our clients, which can potentially have an adverse impact the on the quality and accuracy of the collected data as well as the quality of the relationship with the client.