Effective Counseling Outcome Assessment

Throughout the course of the counseling relationship between the counselor and client, counselors will continuously use assessments in order to provide effective counseling to their client. Counselor uses assessments for a variety of reasons, such as to properly diagnose, measure the degree the problem or issue is affecting the client and to monitor any and all progress the client has made. It is important for the practicing counselor to continually monitor their client during the counseling progress for several reasons, such as making sure the client and counselor are on the same page and making sure the current theory and or treatment plan is proving to be effective with helping the client overcome his or her current problem or issue. Toward …show more content…
When this occurs, it is very important that the counselor be willing to try another treatment plan and theory. In order to make sure the current treatment plan is working, with the client the counselor will continually preform outcome assessment. At this time I myself am in seeing a counselor to address and to work through some issues. The reason why I selected the OQ 45.2 (Outcome Questionnaire) to write my paper on is because the purpose of this assessment is to monitor and measure the client’s level of depression and anxiety, which are to disorder I myself suffer from. When working with a client who experience anxiety and depression in the future I might decide the OQ 45.2 (Outcome Questionnaire) would be effective in monitoring and measuring my client’ …show more content…
Evidence of convergent validity, which the authors refer to as "concurrent" validity (manual, p. 8), isbased on correlations between OQ(c) scores and scores on 10 other tests that measure similar constructs (e.g., BDI, STAI, SCL-90-R). Reportedcorrelation coefficients are satisfactorily high (in the .44-.92 range) and are, at least for the total score, generally in the expected direction. Specificevidence of discriminant validity is lacking. Also lacking is discussion/elaboration of results of initial factor analysis (e.g., item-factor loadings). Thus, the amount of variance accounted for by one-, two-, and three-factor solutions is unknown. Of note, OQ(c) total and subscale scores appear to behighly correlated (in the .83-.93 range), leading the authors to conclude that "they effectively represent a single factor" (manual, p. 38). Thisconclusion raises serious doubts about the theoretical (and empirical) basis of the test's original three-factor organizational/conceptual