Assessment in Counseling: Practice and Applications

Assessment in Counseling takes a different approach to assessment courses, which students often experience as a statistics-heavy class accompanied by a wide variety of assessments. Richard S. Balkin and Gerald A. Juhnke emphasize the skills used in assessment and supports the use of these skills across a broad range of assessment instruments and strategies. Assessment, like more core areas of counseling, has a theoretical basis and a pertinent, practical component. However, this practical component often gets lost in the application of the skills and use of instructions that heavily rely on psychometric properties.

Written in an accessible, conversational tone, the book focuses on the application of the theoretical and measurement concepts of assessment in counseling and introduces three case studies that are followed throughout the text. Instead of introducing readers to a plethora of instruments, Balkin and Juhnke have selected seminal measures that students are likely to come across and use in the profession. Through the use of this book and their course content, students will gain the skills to search, select, and administer the type of assessment instruments deemed helpful for their practice as a professional counselor, regardless of specialization.

This new edition provides updates on the laws, codes, and instruments covered, the most recent application of measures and the psychometric properties associated with them, and additions on career assessment and personality. It also features a new chapter on environmental assessment that highlights data collection practices and the role of assessing, accommodating, and recommending levels of care.

Ultimately, this textbook serves as a guide for administering, scoring, interpreting, and communicating assessment results.

Richard S. Balkin is a Distinguished Professor and Department Chair of Leadership and Counselor Education at the University of Mississippi. He currently serves as Editor-in-Chief for the International Journal for the Advancement of Counselling, is a Fellow of the American Counseling Association, and past-president for the Association for Assessment and Research in Counseling. Balkin began practice as a professional counselor in 1993 and has worked in academia since 2003. He is the author of over 100 publications in counselling assessment and research, including Practicing Forgiveness: A Path Toward Healing, (Oxford University Press, 2020).

Gerald A. Juhnke is an American Counseling Association Fellow and American Association for Marriage and Family Clinical Fellow. Juhnke is a Professor and the Interim Chair for the Department of Counseling at the University of Texas at San Antonio. He is a former President for the Association for Assessment in Counseling, former President for the International Association of Addictions and Offender Counselors, and former Fellow of the North Carolina Governor’s Institute on Alcohol and Substance Abuse. He began his first clinical independent practice in 1986 and has co-authored over 100 publications including 14 textbooks and 18 assessment instruments.