ISO-30™ (Inventory of Suicide Orientation-30)

Authors: John D. King, EdD, and Brian Kowalchuk, PhD

The Inventory of Suicide Orientation-30 (ISO-30) assessment provides an overall suicide risk classification based on measurements of hopelessness and suicide ideation.

How to Use This Test

Appropriate for use by psychologists, licensed social workers, and licensed counselors in outpatient and inpatient mental health facilities, juvenile justice evaluations, and school settings. The ISO-30 assessment can help:

• Identify adolescents at risk for attempting suicide
• Facilitating objective communication with the family, other counseling professionals, and insurance providers
• Measure abatement of suicidal symptoms after an adolescent has been hospitalized

Key Features

• The test's brevity helps minimize test-taking resistance.
• Results help alert psychologists and counselors to the early signs of an adolescent's suicidal tendencies, providing the opportunity for earlier intervention.
• The test's adolescent normative base allows for more relevant comparisons than tests with norms that include adults.

Quick Facts

About the Authors

The Inventory of Suicide Orientation-30 assessment was developed by John D. King, EdD, and Brian Kowalchuk, PhD. Dr. King is a professor in educational administration and special education at the University of Texas. He is also a private practitioner working with adolescents and their families. Dr. Kowalchuk is a staff psychologist for the City of Winnipeg, Canada, and a researcher in the areas of suicide prevention, stress prevention and management, and innovative therapy techniques.

Scales

Helps measure a broadly-defined construct of hopelessness using the total score from the 30 items. Suicide ideation is assessed by 6 critical items within those 30 items. The total score and the critical item score help determine overall suicide risk classification (high, moderate, low).

Norms

Clinical data were collected on 366 adolescents ages 12 to 18. A student sample included 139 students in grades 9 through 12 and 263 junior and senior high school students from an earlier version of the ISO-30 test.

Report Option

Adolescent Profile Report (Product Number 51488)
This report includes the overall risk classification based on the total and critical item scores. Suggestions on how to manage the adolescent are based on the risk classification. Such information can be used in intervention planning and in communicating with parents and insurance providers about treatment decisions. The report also lists critical item responses and omitted items for clinicians to review in follow-up discussions with patients.

View the sample Adolescent Profile Report.

Scoring Options

Q™ Local Software - Enables you to score assessments, report results, and store and export data on your computer.

Hand Scoring - Administer assessments on answer sheets and score them quickly yourself with an answer key.

Optical Scan Scoring - Allows you to score the assessments at your site.

Common Questions and Answers

What are the liability issues involved in using this assessment?
The manual and the report caution against using this information as the sole basis for making a decision about an adolescent's suicide risk. The ISO-30 assessment is intended to be used by professionals as one tool in their assessment process. Just as with any other assessment, the professional who uses the ISO-30 assessment is responsible for its appropriate and ethical application. Also remember that the assessment is intended to help assess risk and not to predict suicide. This is an important distinction.

Should I use this assessment to screen a whole class of students?
No. The ISO-30 assessment is intended to help assess the risk of a student who has been referred for evaluation or therapy. If the ISO-30 assessment is used as a general screener, it will over-identify students at risk (i.e., it will have a high false-positive rate).

Adult Personality - Adolescent Personality - Biopsychosocial - Careers - Achievement/Cognitive
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