Assessment for Diagnosis

Abstract

Assessment serves many goals. As we pointed out in Chapter 2, one of the most common goals of assessment is diagnosis. Making diagnoses is an inevitable part of working with children who present with excessive anxiety and fear. Diagnosis is also, however, one of the areas in which you are most likely to experience the type of uncertainty associated with contexts of complexity and diversity. In addition, for many therapists and clinical researchers, making a diagnosis raises issues that are controversial as well as complex. These issues touch on questions that relate to both the validity and the utility of the diagnostic categories themselves, and the procedures used for making the diagnoses.