Building a reasonable bridge in childhood anxiety assessment: A practitioner's resource guide

This article presents a resource guide for the practice-based assessment of childhood anxiety. Transporting empirically based methods and measures from research to clinical settings can be difficult, and often these methods do not underlie current practice as carried out by assessment-active professionals (Watkins et al., 1995). Consequently, the focus in this paper is on building a reasonable bridge between research-based methods and current assessment practice. Information is provided that can be useful when issues of childhood anxiety are present during assessment (and ongoing treatment). Suggestions are provided regarding brief and focused functional assessment. Methods and measures are described that can be used with school-aged children in the practice setting. Consideration is given to practice implementation of these methods, including recommendations concerning both comprehensive and goal-oriented assessment. Clinical vignettes are provided to illustrate salient issues.