Whitney Graff, Psy.D, ABPP
Clinical Psychologist
Dr. Whitney Graff is a licensed clinical psychologist and board-certified specialist in behavioral and cognitive psychology. She is the owner of Graff Psychological Services, a private practice in Chicago, Illinois, and the founder of ACT On Mental Health, a self-guided mental health education platform. She also co-hosts The Honest Psychologist podcast. Her work emphasizes contextual behavioral approaches, particularly Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, and the intersection between therapeutic approaches and psychological assessment. Dr. Graff has taught psychotherapy methods at the University of Chicago Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice since 2020.
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When Test Data Come Alive: Integrating Context, Function, and Observation in Child Assessment
Abstract: Psychological assessment of children and adolescents necessarily relies on structured measures, symptom inventories, and diagnostic frameworks. These tools provide valuable information, yet they are often asked to do more than they can, standing in for a deeper understanding of why a young person behaves as they do. This presentation introduces a functional contextualist approach to assessment that complements traditional testing methods by situating behavior within its developmental, relational, and environmental contexts and understanding how it has been maintained through interaction with the environment. Moving away from treating test results as indicators of static traits, attendees will explore how symptoms manifest in different ways across settings and contexts (school, home, peer relationships, and the testing room itself). When applied to testing, this perspective allows psychologists to move toward a more dimensional, coherent picture of a child or adolescent’s difficulties. The presentation will highlight the testing process itself as a rich assessment context. Attendees will learn how clinically relevant behaviors, such as avoidance, distraction, emotion dysregulation, perfectionism, or disengagement, often emerge during testing sessions and can be thoughtfully observed, tested, and integrated into case conceptualization. Through de-identified patient examples, participants will be introduced to and practice along with eliciting the context and function of relevant behaviors. Finally, by identifying common functional themes that cut across symptom presentations and diagnoses, testing psychologists can better understand comorbidity, clarify the meaning of test results, and generate recommendations that are precise, individualized, and clinically useful. This approach supports assessments that are not only diagnostically sound, but also developmentally sensitive and practically impactful for families, schools, and treatment providers.
Objectives:
- Articulate how a functional contextualist perspective can be applied to pediatric psychological assessment to understand behavior as context-dependent and functionally meaningful.
- Identify and assess clinically relevant behaviors that emerge during the testing process itself, and integrate these observations with standardized test data to enhance case conceptualization.
- Apply an integrated, contextual case formulation to generate individualized, coherent, and practically useful assessment conclusions and recommendations.
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