Assessment of Personality and Psychopathology with Immigrants and Refugees

Abstract

Abstract Attention to the competent assessment of diverse individuals, including immigrants and refugees, has reached a peak due to the conscientization regarding the social and political discrimination and the limited science, services, and political will to address the systemic inequity impacting the lives of diverse individuals. While psychological science has shown progress to service a multicultural population, assessment models and procedures that meaningfully take into consideration the needs of immigrants are lagging. The psychological assessment field has been criticized for inappropriate use of Western assessment measures and theories on diverse individuals, but that is only one of several problems. The gaps to understand the reality of immigrant clients include the need to integrate factors external to the client in the case formulation, the need to pay greater attention to the evaluative relationship, the impact of microaggressions and insensitivity during the assessment process, and the questionable use of Western methods of diagnosis and assessment with non-Western immigrant clients. This chapter deconstructs these difficulties and shows how to minimize them in the clinical assessment with immigrants.