Vocational diagnosis through assessment of functional limitations

Diagnosis in rehabilitation counseling requires a relatively precise delineation of client assets and liabilities. This is essential in establishing direction for counseling efforts; it can also aid in evaluating counseling effectiveness by providing a means of grouping cases according to difficulty or types of problems. This paper identifies the disadvantages of present systems of medical and psychiatric diagnoses for these vocational counseling purposes. It discusses some of the methodological issues involved in establishing a new system for recording client problems. The paper also introduces a brief, yet comprehensive inventory of functional limitations which has been developed in the Counseling Psychology Service of the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at the University of Minnesota.