The psychosocial assessment is defined as:
The psychosocial assessment helps in providing the realistic picture about the individual interaction with their social environment. This type of picture consists of the relevant information regarding the personality of the individual makeup and the existing level of functioning and also the information on stressors and resources in person life situation.
Example: the clinician acts as puzzle solvers, absorbing the required information about individual existing feelings, attitudes, memories, demographic facts. The clinicians attempt to fit the appropriate pieces together to form a meaningful pattern.
The clinicians’ use some of the psychosocial procedures that used are:
Assessment interviews: it is the central element of the assessment process in the psychosocial assessment which involves face-to-face interaction where the clinician obtains the information regarding the various aspects of client behaviour, personality and behaviour. The clinician use set of questions or the prompts detailed format observes and acts moment-to moment decisions to change on his questions on basis of the client response to previous ones.
Structured and unstructured interviews:
Structured assessment interviews: the structured assessment interview produces more of reliable results compared to flexible format. Structured interviews consist of predetermined set of questions throughout the interview. Example: “have you experienced feeling nervous giving speech on the stage?”
Unstructured assessment interviews: are typically confined to subjective and do not follow the predetermined set of questions. The statement begins in the interview are general normally. They follow-up questions are being tailored for different clients. The content is based on the theoretical view. The questions are not repeated for all clients but the questions are asked on basis of the previous answers given by the client.
Clinical observation of behaviour
It is the one of the traditional as well as most useful assessment tools used by clinician in involving direct observation of a client characteristic behaviour. The purpose of the direct observation is to understand and learn more on the person psychological functioning by presenting to the person appearance and behaviour on different contexts.
Rating scales
The rating scale helps clinically in observation and self-reports on individuals in assisting to organise information and also encourage reliability and objectivity. The rating scale helps in keeping the observer interferences to a minimum.