Assessment in Counseling ─ Practice and Applications

Students often experience assessment courses, and subsequently the textbooks used for the course, as a statistics-heavy class accompanied by an encyclopedia of a variety of assessments. Assessment in Counseling alternatively emphasizes the skills used in assessment, thereby enabling students to apply these skills across a broad range of assessment instruments and strategies. Assessment, like most core areas of counseling, has a theoretical basis and a pertinent, practical component. However, this practical component often gets lost in the application of the skills and use of instruments that heavily rely on psychometric properties.

Written in an accessible, conversational tone, this text focuses on the application of the theoretical and measurement concepts of assessment in counseling and introduces three case studies that are followed throughout the text. Additionally, instead of introducing readers to a plethora of instruments, the authors select seminal measures that students are likely to approach and use in the profession. Through the use of this text and course content, one will acquire the skills to search, select, and administer the type of assessment instruments that he/she deems helpful for their practice as a professional counselor, regardless of specialization. Ultimately, this textbook serves as an invaluable guide for administering, scoring, interpreting, and communicating assessment results.

Richard S. Balkin, PhD, MEd, is a Professor and Doctoral Program Coordinator at the University of Louisville. Dr. Balkin is a Fellow of the American Counseling Association; the editor for the Journal of Counseling and Development, the flagship journal for the American Counseling Association; and former President for the Association for Assessment and Research in Counseling. He serves on numerous committees for ACA. Dr. Balkin has over 70 publications, which include text books on assessment in counseling and soon-to-be published textbooks on research, published tests and technical manuals, peer-reviewed manuscripts, book chapters, and conference proceedings. His counseling experience with at-risk youth was formative to his research agenda, which includes understanding the role of counseling and relevant goals for adolescents in crisis and counseling outcomes. This led to numerous published articles and one published measure through Mindgarden (Crisis Stabilization Scale) related to assessing and counseling at-risk youth. He has published in the area of religious diversity and forgiveness and developed a model and measure for counseling clients through issues of forgiveness and conflict.

Gerald A. Juhnke, DEd, MA, is a Professor and the former founding Doctoral Program Director in the Department of Counseling at The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) who has authored more than 55-refereed articles, 14 assessment instruments, and presented over 150 professional presentations. Jerry is an American Counseling Association Fellow, former president of seven professional associations, Associate Editor for the Journal of Counseling and Development, former Editor in Chief of The Journal of Addictions and Offender Counseling, and former Co-Chair of the American Counseling Association's Council of Journal Editors. He has received numerous counseling and teaching awards including the American Counseling Association's David K. Brooks' Distinguished Mentor Award, the American Counseling Association's Ralph F. Berdie Research Award, and the International Association for Addictions and Offender Counseling Addictions Educator Excellence Award.