Behavioral Assessment

Description of the Strategy

Behavioral assessment is a flexible system of measurement and judgment that emphasizes principles and concepts of assessment more than the use of specific methods. Behavioral assessment emphasizes the measurement of external environmental factors, such as the social setting in which a client's problem behaviors occur and how others respond to those behaviors; cognitive processes, such as a client's thoughts and beliefs; and overt behavior, such as how a person acts in a particular environment. Behavioral assessment is closely tied to well-established models of learning (such as operant conditioning, classical conditioning, and social learning), and it is strongly influenced by research. For example, the emphasis on the social contexts of problem behavior is derived from many studies that have shown that individuals' social environments can have an influence on the onset, maintenance, magnitude, and cessation of behavior problems, as well as the degree to which treatment goals are achieved.

The guiding principles and concepts of behavioral assessment can be contrasted with those of psychodynamic and personality assessment systems. Unlike behavioral assessment, the latter systems assume that behavioral problems arise primarily from stable, internal, psychological processes, such as unconscious conflicts and dysfunctional personality characteristics. Because in these systems, the main determinants of behavior problems are considered to be internal and stable psychological processes, personality and projective assessment systems emphasize the measurement of internal experiences and personality characteristics by using assessment instruments such as the Rorschach and personality inventories. In contrast, principles of behavioral assessment emphasize measurement through [Page 83]observation, instrumentation, self-monitoring, and behaviorally focused interviews and questionnaires.

Let us begin by reviewing several conceptual foundations of behavioral assessment. The first, as suggested above, is environmental determinism. According to the principle of environmental determinism, how an individual behaves (e.g., the likelihood that an individual suffering from depression will engage in self-harm) can often be affected by his or her current situation, as well as how others have responded to certain key behaviors in the past. Learning principles (e.g., reinforcement, punishment, classical conditioning, modeling) are of particular importance in helping us understand these behavior-environment relations. In general, many behaviors, both adaptive and maladaptive, are thought of as responses to specific environmental events that precede, co-occur, and/or follow them.

A second conceptual foundation for behavioral assessment is an emphasis on empiricism: the idea that problems can best be understood through the use of scientific methods. When applied to behavioral assessment, empiricism emphasizes use of systematic observation, careful measurement and the formulation of definitions of behaviors and environmental events, the use of well-validated assessment instruments, and control or monitoring of the assessment environment to learn about the form and function of an individual's behavior.

There are several additional characteristics of behavioral assessment. First, the hypothetico-deductive method is often used to learn more about a client. In this method of inquiry, an assessor develops hypotheses about the behavior of a client and subsequently designs assessment strategies to test those hypotheses. For example, the assessor may hypothesize that a client may be more likely to injure herself following a confrontation with her spouse. To test this hypothesis, the assessor might request that the client self-monitor marital conflict and instances of self-harm, to see whether there is an elevated chance of self-harm following conflict compared with nonconflict times.

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