Strength‐based assessment in clinical practice

Abstract

Strength-based assessment can enhance clinical clarity, improve the range of information, and provide a more complete picture of clients and their circumstances. Deficit-oriented assessment has improved the assessment and treatment of a number of disorders but, at the same time, has created a negative bias, considered strengths as clinical peripheries or by-products, tended to reduce clients to diagnostic categories, and created a power differential, which could be counterproductive to clinical efficacy. Strength-based assessment explores weaknesses as well as strengths to effectively deal with problems. We present a number of strength-based strategies for use in clinical practice. These strategies, we hope, will help clinicians to operationalize how strengths and weaknesses reverberate and contribute to a client's psychological status, which is comprehensive and guards against negative bias.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 158 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.