Customer Reviews

Practitioner's Guide to Empirically Based Measures of Anxiety (AABT Clinical Assessment) (ABCT Clinical Assessment Series)

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I am always seeking books that include a wide range of psychometric instruments that can be used to instruct students regarding concepts such as reliability and validity. In addition, I prefer to use psychometric instruments that appear to have some practical application for our graduates.

THE PRACTITIONER'S GUIDE TO EMPIRICALLY BASED MEASURES OF ANXIETY includes a description of the psychometric qualities of 354 anxiety scales. These 354 scales fit into one of seven categories that include:

Measures for anxiety and related constructs
Measures for panic disorders and agoraphobic
Measures for specific phobia
Measures for social phobia
Measures for generalized anxiety disorder
Measures for obsessive-compulsive disorder
Measures for acute stress disorder and posttraumatic stress disorder

The wide variety of methods for assessing the degree of anxiety is nothing less than overwhelming. To describe about HALF of the measurements, authors use the following outline:

Original Citation
Purpose
Description
Background
Administration
Scoring
Interpretation
Psychometric Properties (Norms, Reliability, and Validity)
Clinical Utility
Research Applicability
Source
Cost
Alternative Forms

The consistency of this outline is quite helpful in reviewing these instruments when students are first learning about test construction.

The other HALF are described in a machine gun manner with one citation. These short descriptions offer little assistance. For example, I read brief description of the Student Worry Scale on page 209. I wanted to learn more about it and started searching for the citation. The search proved to be too much trouble for my purposes, so I gave up.

Most importantly, the authors have included reprints of 80 instruments that are divided into the following categories:

Measures for anxiety and related constructs
Measures for panic disorders and agoraphobic
Measures for specific phobia
Measures for social phobia
Measures for generalized anxiety disorder
Measures for obsessive-compulsive disorder
Measures for acute stress disorder and posttraumatic stress disorder

These reproductions are extremely helpful for students who are first learning about test construction.

In addition to being a wonderful tool to learn the basic of instrument construction, THE PRACTITIONER'S GUIDE TO EMPIRICALLY BASED MEASURES OF ANXIETY is an equally beneficial tool for the practitioner and the researcher. In fact, I suspect that the author's primary intended audience is practitioners. Regardless, this is a wonderful volume that will be a great benefit to many.

As a side note, the publisher Kluwer Academic/Plenum has produced a similar book entitled, THE PRACTITIONER'S GUIDE TO EMPIRICALLY BASED MEASURES OF DEPRESSION. It too, is an excellent volume.