Ambulatory assessment in clinical child and adolescent psychology

Over the past 20 years ambulatory assessment (AA) became an important component of the methodological repertoire in clinical psychological research of childhood and adolescence. AA allows to repeatedly assess behaviors and subjective experiences in the everyday lives of children, adolescents and their families. The popularity of the method stems from the fact that AA captures (dys)functional behavioral and experiential patterns along with corresponding triggers analogous to clinical theory. In other words, context-dependent dynamic processes within a child or adolescent can be empirically tested, such as when and under which circumstances specific symptoms are expressed in daily family or school life. That way, AA contributes to increased generalizability of the acquired data to typical behavioral spectra of the participants. This article illustrates how AA can contribute to more accurate and more truthful descriptive models of mental disorders in childhood and adolescence and how AA may aid empirical tests of clinical theories in psychotherapeutic research and practice. The article concludes with a discussion of the potential utility of AA for individualized interventions in the everyday lives of affected children, adolescents, and their families.