Using narratives to assess competencies and risks in young children: Experiences with high risk and normal populations

The young child's mental representations convey a wealth of information about his/her early moral and emotional construction of reality. The MacArthur Story Stem Battery (MSSB) is a unique, child-friendly tool for assessing socioemotional development in young children (3–6 years). The technique provides incomplete stories (stems), which are completed by the child using their own verbalizations and actions with doll figures. A sensitive examiner scaffolds appropriate boundaries for the task. The MSSB has demonstrated adequate psychometric properties and initial studies suggest the MSSB can tap important prosocial competencies as well as features indicative of psychopathology and distress. The MSSB has been translated and used in a number of countries across the world, in part due to the measure's clinical utility to quickly assess children at the level of representation. Current innovations reviewed emphasize the use of the MSSB for assessment in clinical and at-risk populations. A table summarizing key clinically relevant articles on the MSSB is referenced throughout the paper.