Purpose: CASIG is designed to be the principal assessment instrument for planning, evaluating, and modifying individual and programmatic rehabilitation treatment.

Use: CASIG assesses six key areas of a consumer’s life:

1. Goals. The consumer's goals for improved functioning during the next year are elicited with open-ended questions grouped into five major domains of community living; housing, financial-vocational, social-familial, religion, and physical-mental health. Except for slight variations in wording to fit a particular domain, the open-ended questions include:
   

   • Would you like to improve your (functional domain) in the next year?
   • How might you improve your (functional domain)?
   • What do you currently have (i.e., resources, experience, assets) to help you?
   • What help do you need to achieve your goal?
2. Current functioning. The consumer's current performance of the skills of nine domains of functioning are assessed with from four to nine closed-ended questions in each domain. The nine domains include money management, health management, friends, leisure, vocational, personal hygiene, care of personal possessions, nutrition, and transportation. The client is also asked if s/he would like to make it a personal goal to improve his/her performance in each domain.
   
3. Medication Practices. The client’s attitude toward his/her psychoactive medication is assessed with six closed-ended questions and two open-ended questions about his/her knowledge of the names and effects of his/her medications. The client is also asked about the presence/absence of each of 18 side effects, and his/her wish to learn more about medications and be responsible for administering them.
   
4. Quality of Life and Treatment. The client is asked to rate each of 10 qualities of his/her life (e.g., “the money you have”) and 11 qualities of his/her treatment (e.g., “psychiatrist explains treatment”) on a 4 point scale (poor, fair, good, excellent).
   
5. Symptoms. The client is asked a set of questions to determine the presence/absence of each of six symptoms; anxiety, depression, suicidality, hallucinations, delusions, and mania. The goal is to detect impending symptomatic relapse and, if that is indeed the case, confer with the client’s psychiatrist to specify the actions for averting the relapse. The criteria for conferring with the client’s psychiatrist are deliberately biased to identify false positives so that the much more costly false negatives can be avoided. The client is also asked if s/he would like to make it a personal goal to control any symptom(s) s/he experiences.
   
6. Unacceptable Community Behaviors. The client is asked about his/her performance of 10 unacceptable behaviors such as use of illegal street drugs, excessive alcohol consumption, verbal assault, physical assault, and property destruction. The intent is to determine if the client has performed a behavior that might represent a risk to the community.

CASIG-SR and CASIG-I. There are two versions of CASIG; CASIG-SR is the client’s self-report, and CASIG-I is the report by a knowledgeable stakeholder in the client’s rehabilitation. The two assess the same areas and domains with slightly different wording that reflects the different perspectives of the respondents. CASIG-SR, for example, asks the client “Would you like to improve your physical health in the next year?”, compared to CASIG-I that asks the informant “Should the client improve his/her physical health in the next year?”

Time-frame of the questions. Except for the prospective time-frame used with the goal questions, most of the other questions cover the past 90 days. However, the Personal Hygiene and Care of Personal Possessions items have shorter periods that vary from item to item, and the quality of life, quality of treatment, and medication practices items refer to the client’s current attitudes and behaviors.

Administration: CASIG is so highly structured and thoroughly specified that it can be administered with little or no training. Indeed, the vast majority of the data collected to verify CASIG’s reliability and validity was gathered by 18 SPMI clients who were members of a self-help group. Each of their 243 interviews was audiotape recorded and reviewed for accuracy in both administration and recording. Thirteen of the 15 interviewers were perfect in all interviews, and the miscues made by the remaining two were minor (Lecomte, Wilde, and Wallace, 1999).

Manual: The manual includes the current versions of CASIG-SR and CASIG-I, an overview of its use in treatment planning and program evaluation, the several articles that have been published about its psychometric characteristics, and previous versions of CASIG that have been developed for use in specialized programs and settings.

To Order

Assessment Tool	Cat. No.	Price	Order
CASIG: Client's Assessment of Strengths, Interests & Goals	AT02	$40.00