Contains: The equivalent of the 2-1/2 day onsite seminar, “How To Conduct A Comprehensive Custody Evaluation.” Offers 16 Continuing Education Credits. Over 300 pages of material, including samples of actual tests. Includes Authors Email & Contact Numbers.

A HOME STUDY COURSE---PLUS SO MUCH MORE!

A totally integrated start-to-finish training, guiding the evaluator from how to get referrals to the very first contacts with attorneys or parents, right on through to a possible courtroom presentation, plus ways to get future work with the involved attorneys by using the knowledge gained from the home seminar as a basis for offering your services as a consultant.

At the completion of this course, you will receive full certification of your training and supervision to conduct comprehensive custody evaluations.

Contains the equivalent of the 2½ day onsite seminar, “How To Conduct A Comprehensive Custody Evaluation.” Over 300 pages of material, including samples of actual tests and useful research data. Includes authors’ email and contact numbers.

Receive the benefits of our special home seminar:

• You can contact (by email or phone) Drs. Bricklin and Elliot with questions at any point while you are completing the Home Study Course.

• You will have access to Drs. Bricklin and Elliot for a full year of free consultations concerning your custody evaluation cases.

• You will receive helpful and important free supplementary materials, for example, our research on the complex issue of splitting up siblings, and a list of documents some parents are likely to keep hidden from you (in addition to pornography).

COURSE CONTENT:

Part One

• Your initial entry into a custody case: legal and ethical issues in dealing with parents and attorneys.

• How to choose and develop the various roles you can play in a custody case.

• Setting up the evaluation. The use of a detailed model contract to aid in: understanding and adhering to ethical, statutory and case-law criteria; handling complex confidentiality issues; scheduling scientifically defensible observation scenarios; guiding the collection of home-study, documentary, and collateral-informant data; protecting the current and future use of all of your data.

• How to identify relevant social science research and make sure it is used effectively where it really counts.

• How the legal criteria typically play out in real-life courtroom settings.

• How to differentiate measurements and issues relevant to legal custody as contrasted to those pertinent to physical custody.

• The forty-one essential Critical Targets of a comprehensive evaluation.

• How to think about and measure the impact of a parent’s range of personality styles on a given child at a particular time in that child’s development.

• How to overcome the limitations in interview and observation data.

• The appropriate use of traditional psychological tests and the use of specialized, data-based, custody-relevant tests, the Bricklin Perceptual Scales (BPS) and the Perception-of-Relationships Test (PORT).

• Case examples

  Part Two

• How to plan and carry out observation sessions that are (1) scientifically defensible (2) exhaustive with respect to the issues they must address; (3) able to red-flag parental behavior that is manipulative and/or intimidating; (4) able to detect verbal and non-verbal behavior of the child that is not based on that child’s actual interactions with a parent but rather on manipulative and/or intimidating behavior by the parent(s).

• How to gather information that directly assesses a parent’s child care skills.

• How to gather information that reflects a parent’s detailed knowledge of, and ability to care for, each child in custody-relevant areas (e.g., knowledge of a child’s developmental, interpersonal, emotional, educational, and medical needs as well as the ways in which a child best processes information.

• How to optimize the amount of information that can be gleaned from a home-visit (or home-study), including safety issues, life-style issues as well as complex issues like relocation (or “move away” cases).

• How to understand and articulate to a legal decision-maker, both formal and informal models with which the large amounts of data collected can be prioritized.

• Case examples.

• How to decide the format to use in writing your report (Is your purpose therapeutic? Designed to encourage mediation? Part of a bitter adversary battle?)

• A beginning-to-end listing of the real-life sequence of steps involved in planning and achieving a comprehensive evaluation.

  Part Three

• Recognizing the particularly complex or controversial dual relationship issues.

• Effective and ineffective ways to deal with subpoenas, depositions, and test-security issues.

• How to recognize cross-examination strategies that are particularly dangerous.

• How to recognize situations in which your data are likely to radically shift within either short-term or long-term time intervals i.e., learn to differentiate between possible test-retest changes that are due to errors of measurement as opposed to changes due to actual shifts in the variables measured.

• The single best way to get new referrals.

• How to set fees and collect them.

• WHO SHOULD TAKE THIS COURSE

• This course is intended for practicing mental health professionals including: Psychologists, Social Workers, Psychiatrists, Marriage and Family Therapists, Marriage and Family Counselors, and Professional Counselors. THIS COURSE IS VALUABLE AND AVAILABLE FOR ALL MENTAL HEALTH PROFESSIONALS WHO PERFORM OR PLAN TO PERFORM ASSESSMENTS ON CUSTODY RELATED ISSUES. THOSE IN A CONSULTING ROLE WILL BE ABLE TO QUICKLY EVALUATE THE USEFULNESS AND COMPREHENSIVENESS OF EVALUATIONS BY OTHERS.

PACE is approved by the American Psychological Association to sponsor continuing education for psychologists. PACE maintains responsibility for this program and its content. Mental health professionals from every state and every mental health specialty have received continuing education credits for this home study course based on the specific internal criteria established by their governing bodies. Three and one-half (3.5) hours of continuing education shall be counted for ethics where an ethics requirement shall exist.