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Essay on Principles for Counseling Blended Families
U.S. society, the term step, when combined with mother, father, child or family, is often used to indicate abnormal or substandard. By the year 2000, however, stepfamilies (also known as blendedfamilies) will be the norm-more than 50% of US. families. All counselors engage in assessment on a daily basis, whether through using published instruments, conducting intake interviews, or listening to a client's tearful description of parental loss. Integrating refined assessment skills into professionals' work will make them excellent counselors. Yet, in my experience, not all counselor education students embrace assessment in counseling, fearing its psychometric complexities, its perceived tyranny of the norm to the detriment of the individual, the seemingly endless types of assessments that they believe they would need to know about to be experts, and the memory of their own ego-bruising experiences with standardized tests.
Whiston addresses these concerns by pointedly denying any intention of creating statisticians. Rather, as laid out in the book's three sections, her goals are to help counselors-in-training develop a solid foundation in measurement concepts, obtain a clear understanding of specific methods of client assessment, and address topics and pertinent issues related to assessment application.Counselors need to understand to be able to ethically choose, use, and interpret any assessment tool. In specific, she introduces the reader to the history and purpose of assessment; then covers basic measurement principles; introduces and explores the importance of reliability and validity; and rounds out the section with a systematic process for selecting, administering, scoring, and interpreting assessment results.Covering the history of assessment, types of assessment tools, ways to identify appropriate assessment strategies, and what general assessment resources are available to counselors.
Her coverage of the history of testing is predominantly counselor-friendly and does a wonderful job of weaving world events, scientific thinking, societal change, and technological change into an understanding of the development of assessment--although Whiston does not include a nod to Frank Parsons's early attempt to offer what could be considered a semistructured........
