Creating the Road Map: Helping Families make meaning out of confusion in complex collaborative therapeutic assessments

This presentation will focus on meaningful feedback to families (parents, teens, older children) in the context of complex, multi-method assessments with a collaborative therapeutic assessment orientation. In particular, I will give examples of how to prioritize test findings so that the results (and report) clarify the picture- creating an effective road map to help guide families- rather than overwhelming them with too much data and too many recommendations.  Often in complex assessments with children and adolescents the assessor has cognitive, neuropsychological, academic and personality performance tests as well as input from multiple sources.  It can be challenging to bring the most significant and relevant results into clear focus. How to synthesize, integrate and prioritize can be tricky for both assessor and the family, adding to anxiety or overwhelm rather than clarifying the picture and “next steps.”

Several case vignettes will be used to illustrate situations in which parents, teachers and therapists all had some significant pieces of the puzzle about a child or teen, but there was paralysis, confusion about who was right about what, what was most important, competing narratives and intense anxiety that made it difficult to bring the picture- and the young person’s experience- into clear focus.  Prioritizing the assessment questions and goals, and determining the most salient test results, helped to bring order and clarity to the picture. This approach also pointed parents in the right directions and prioritized interventions, meaning test results served the purpose of creating effective “sign posts” in the road map.  

Presenter: Diane Santas, PhD

Learning Objectives:

• Describe how to prioritize test findings in complex evaluations based on  questions and goals for the assessment
• Describe how to create a “road map” for families in feedback sessions and report writing to create clarity and reduce overwhelm in complex multi-method assessments with children and teens

The Society for Personality Assessment (SPA) is approved by the American Psychological Association to sponsor continuing education for psychologists. SPA maintains responsibility for this program and its content.

Society for Personality Assessment is recognized by the New York State Education Department's State Board for Psychology as an approved provider of continuing education for licensed psychologists #PSY-0218.