Applying a Narrative Frame to the Assessment of Children

Abstract

Psychological assessment has been sharply criticized for its role in sorting children, especially nunority children (Jitendra & Rohena-Diaz, 1996; Malgady, 1996), and for representing the views of the dominant school structure (Milofsky, 1989). This article calls for reconceptualization of psychological assessment of children as narrative, representing both the process and product of constructing the story of a child's growth. Psychological assessment and report writing are reframed here as hermeneutic activities that seek to understand the meanings of children's behavior in the social and cultural contexts in which children grow. Narrative is proposed as an alternate framework to that provided by the diagnostic/prescriptive model, grounding psychological assessment in a humanistic rather than positivistic tradition of identification and remediation of pathology. The psychological report is explored as a particular kind of writing that shares with ofher narrative genres an emphnsis On developing a plausible life story by creating a coherent whole out of disparate events. Special consideration is given to the role responsibility of psychologists as narrators of children's life storirs. Finally, the implications of a narrative framework on the practice of psychological assessment of children, and on the training of psychologists who work with children are raised.