Dr. Steven Smith of UC Santa Barbara’s Gevirtz School—along with Dr. Radhika Krishnamurthy, Distinguished Professor at Florida Institute of Technology’s College of Psychology and Liberal Arts—has co-edited Diversity-Sensitive Personality Assessment (Routledge, 2018).
Diversity-Sensitive Personality Assessment is a comprehensive guide for clinicians to consider how various aspects of client diversity—ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, age, nationality, religion, regionalism, socioeconomic status, and disability status—can impact assessment results, interpretation, and feedback. The book examines the influence of clinician, client, interpersonal, and professional factors within the assessment context. This richly informed and clinically useful volume encourages clinicians to delve into the complex ways in which individuals’ personal characteristics, backgrounds, and viewpoints intersect. This book fills an important gap in the personality assessment literature and is an essential resource for clinicians looking to move beyond surface-level understandings of diversity in assessment.
“Diversity-Sensitive Personality Assessment should quickly become the primary reference for clinicians that want an in-depth discussion of diversity and personality assessment that goes beyond simplistic answers to the complex issues in this crucial area,” Robert P. Archer, Frank Harrell Redwood Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Eastern Virginia Medical School, writes. “Smith and Krishnamurthy have assembled an outstanding group of chapter contributors to explore diversity issues that include race, gender, and ethnicity, but also extend to explorations of the important aspects of diversity related to religion, age, disability status, socio-economic status, nationality and regional identification. This insightful and comprehensive text will be an invaluable resource to clinicians seeking to understand and integrate diversity considerations into their assessment practice.”
Steve Smith is an Associate Professor in the Department of Counseling, Clinical, and School Psychology. He teaches courses in assessment and serves as the Graduate Advisor. He is interested in masculine identity development and psychotherapy with boys and men, psychotherapy with athletes, healthy models of youth sport, and diversity issues in personality assessment.