Abstract
To appropriately evaluate people in their communities requires careful consideration of a panoply of contextual parameters. These include a welcoming and safe ambience; physical plant characteristics; the clinical setting (e.g., inpatient, outpatient, emergency room, homeless shelter or under a bridge, criminal justice location); whether the assessment is routine, urgent, emergent, or investigatory; the nature of the evaluation’s expected product; the cultural attributes of the evaluator as well as the patient; and the social determinants impacting the patient. Consideration of all these contextual issues will expand the evaluator’s capacity to establish a therapeutic alliance, to engage the patient in the assessment, and possibly to further treatment. Awareness of and responses to these contextual concerns will improve both the evaluative process and the evaluation product.
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Goldfinger, S.M., Feldman, J.M. (2022). Context-Specific Assessment. In: Sowers, W.E., McQuistion, H.L., Ranz, J.M., Feldman, J.M., Runnels, P.S. (eds) Textbook of Community Psychiatry. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10239-4_12
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