Assessment of hoarding

Various questionnaires and interviews have been created over the years to assess compulsive hoarding. In this article, we summarize existing measures, offer practice-friendly suggestions for assessment of hoarding, and address frequent problems in its clinical evaluation. Existing measures for hoarding can be divided into those that are subscales of general measures of obsessive-compulsive disorder (e.g., Obsessive-Compulsive Inventory and Yale-Brown Obsessive-Compulsive Scale) and those that were developed specifically for hoarding and related phenomena. The former were largely developed without the benefit of research identifying the nature of hoarding, while the latter capture the specific dimensions of hoarding and are recommended for clinical use. We provide a case illustration and additional clinical considerations in the assessment of hoarding as well.