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Unlike other assessment tests developed for adults and adapted for adolescents, the MACI was created to address the unique concerns, pressures, and situations of adolescents. The MACI is also constructed using an underlying theory of personality and psychopathology. The MACI is a 160-item, 31-scale self report inventory that was designed to assess personality styles, significant problems or concerns, and clinical symptoms in adolescents. Using a true false format, the MACI surveys a wide range of personality characteristics and clinical symptoms that tend to be a focus in psychological evaluations of teenagers that either have or are suspected of having emotional or behavioral difficulties.

While multi-scale personality inventories such as the MACI are useful for improving the clinician's understanding of an adolescent's personality and clinical symptoms, there are other reasons for using such instruments. The MACI can be used to formulate diagnostic hypotheses, confirm clinical diagnoses, formulate treatment plans, or assist in decision making surrounding case management and disposition planning. The MACI can be used as an outcome measure to evaluate changes in an adolescent's functioning as a result of treatment and intervention. Of course, the MACI can also be usedin research studies to investigate a range of issues that pertain to adolescent psychopathology, personality, and treatment response.

Drawing on a broad range of sources, including data in the MACI manual, published research studies, unpublished research, theoretical literature, and his own experience with the test, Joseph McCann lays the groundwork for the basis of the test and then offers an exhaustive exploration of all facets of the test. Recognizing both the strengths and weaknesses of the MACI, McCann offers a balanced and comprehensive resource on this vital assessment tool.

"This book fills an important gap in the clinical literature . . . Joseph McCann, author of this first full text on the MACI, is the best known workshop presenter on the topic. Assessment with the MACI will enable the student and the clinician to develop a sophisticated basis for disentangling the many variations among youngsters, to assess both their assets and liabilities, to determine the presence of clinical disorders, and, most importantly, to provide a full picture that can serve as the basis for making decisions regarding each adolescent's welfare, that is, to be able to outline a logical course of treatment which may prove more optimally efficacious. It will guide the reader to transform the raw MACI test data, coordinate these data with the history of the youngster's experience, as well as with observational and interview information, facilitating interpretive syntheses and providing thereby a basis to help link assessment to psychotherapy. This text is insightful and comprehensive, a work of inestimable value to both practicing clinicians and students." --Theodore Millon, from the Foreword.