Clinician's Guide to the Assessment Checklist Series: Specialized mental health measures for children in care - Hardcover

The Assessment Checklist series, created by Michael Tarren-Sweeney, provides the world’s first standardised caregiver-report measures of a range of attachment- and trauma-related mental health difficulties experienced amongst children growing up in foster, adoptive, kinship and residential care. This clinical manual provides essential guidance for child and adolescent mental health clinicians who use the Assessment Checklist measures, including the Assessment Checklist for Children (ACC), the Assessment Checklist for Adolescents (ACA) and the Brief Assessment Checklists (BAC), as part of their specialized assessments of children and adolescents in care.

Split into three parts, the book explores all aspects of using and interpreting the Checklist series. Part 1 provides an overview of the Assessment Checklist measures, the rationale for their development and instructions on how to use the measures for clinical assessment, screening and treatment monitoring. Part 2 provides expert guidance to clinicians on interpreting Assessment Checklist score profiles and provides detailed information about several specific types of mental health difficulties measured by them. Part 3 describes the development and psychometric properties of the various Assessment Checklist measures, including information about their validity and reliability. It also introduces several new measures that are under development.

Ideal for clinical child psychologists, child and adolescent psychiatrists, child psychotherapists and clinical social workers looking to improve the quality and depth of their clinical assessments with children and adolescents, this book provides essential guidance on professional use of the Assessment Checklist measures.

Michael Tarren-Sweeney is a clinical child psychologist, epidemiologist and child developmental theorist. He is Associate Professor of Child and Family Psychology at Canterbury University in New Zealand as well as a consultant clinical psychologist for government and charitable children’s agencies in Australia.