TPC-Journal-V4-Issue3

The Professional Counselor \Volume 4, Issue 3 227 The measures may be helpful in confirming clinical impressions or identifying potential problem areas that warrant further exploration. To some degree, however, counselors should be aware of potential ethical dilemmas that could arise from using the emerging measures endorsed by the APA. According to the American Counseling Association (ACA), “counselors have a responsibility to the public to engage in counseling practices that are based on rigorous research methodologies” (2014, p. 8). Clearly, the extent to which the published emerging measures represent rigorous research is at issue. APA does identify the measures as “emerging” (2013g, p. 729), thereby acknowledging the preliminary nature of the dimensional assessments. From a public health standpoint, the consequences of basing diagnoses or justifying clinical care or improvement solely on the emerging measures could be egregious. As third-party payers and managed care companies scramble to adopt the new classification system, the presence of the emerging measures could be mistaken as an endorsement for their adoption by organizations (e.g., managed care companies) that lack the understanding of the measurement and evaluation principles. The presence of the emerging measures in the DSM-5 presents an incomplete system that may not augment comprehensively the categorical system of diagnosis currently endorsed by the APA (2013g). Counselors using the emerging measures should employ other well-established measures and protocols to corroborate their clinical impressions and findings. Counselors should be careful when interpreting the results of instruments that lack adequate empirical data to support respondent results; they should also qualify any conclusions, diagnoses, or recommendations that are based on assessments or instruments (ACA, 2014, p. 12). When emerging measures are used for diagnostic classification or to denote changes in symptoms or distress, counselors should identify the extent to which the findings from the dimensional assessment match the clinical impressions or findings from other assessment tools. Assessment tools, in general, provide information that should not stand alone (Balkin & Juhnke, 2014), and the use of the dimensional measures is not an exception to this rule. Conflict of Interest and Funding Disclosure The author reported no conflict of interest or funding contributions for the development of this manuscript. References Aldea, M. A., Rahman, O., & Storch, E. A. (2009). The psychometric properties of the Florida Obsessive Compulsive Inventory: Examination in a non-clinical sample. Individual Differences Research , 7 , 228–238. Allgaier, A.-K., Pietsch, K., Fr he, B., Sigl-Glöckner, J., & Schulte-Körne, G. (2012). Screening for depression in adolescents: Validity of the patient health questionnaire in pediatric care. Depression and Anxiety , 29 , 906–913. doi:10.1002/da.21971 Altman, E. G., Hedeker, D., Peterson, J. L., & Davis, J. M. (1997). The Altman Self-Rating Mania Scale. Biological Psychiatry , 42 , 948–955. American Counseling Association. (2014). 2014 ACA code of ethics. Alexandria, VA: Author. American Educational Research Association, American Psychological Association, & National Council on Measurement in Education. (1999). Standards for educational and psychological testing . Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association. American Educational Research Association, American Psychological Association, & National Council on Measurement in Education. (2009). Standards for educational and psychological testing . Retrieved from http://www. teststandards.org American Psychiatric Association. (2013a). Clinician-Rated Dimensions of Psychosis Symptom Severity [Measurement