By contrast, an assessment usually is engaged to guide an action that is much bigger in scope and duration. It concerns the future of an entire program or even an entire institution. In essence, we are creating a guiding narrative when engaging in an assessment – or at least an assessment that is meant to be used rather than simply produced and put on a shelf (usually to comply with some external directive).
To return again to our conjectures about who might be supportive of assessment (rather than diagnostic) processes, we predict that the assessment-oriented folks score high on Carl Jung’s “perceiving” function—or at least the system in which they operate is saturated with Jung’ perceiving function (it is important, when engaging Jung’s typology, to look not only at individual personalities, but also the environments in which one is operating.
While diagnosis is about coming quickly to a decision, assessment is about obtaining a full picture. While diagnosis is convergent—moving toward a specific description and diagnosis, assessment is divergent—moving outward and expanding. Assessment is about enriching one’s perspective of a program or institution through expansion in the sources and methods of obtaining information ((as we shall note shortly when describing a process called Triangulation
While this essay is not intended to focus on assessment, we offer a few simple principles that will later help to direct our attention to specific aspects of clinical diagnostic processes (that are or are not present). First, assessments can be directed toward setting realistic goals for a new program—the assessment being done on similar existing programs or on the perceived needs of potential users of the services being offered by the new program and/or the expectations of key stakeholders associated with the program. The assessment can also be conducted after the program is in place (or when the leaders of an institution wish to review and improve functioning in their organization.
