All right, everyone. Welcome back to The Testing Psychologist podcast. Today’s episode is another replay of a popular episode from the past while I take a break, regroup, get my interview straightened out and get some content ready. I hope you enjoy this conversation with Dr. Bryn Harris from episode number 23, all about Culturally and Linguistically Responsive Assessment.
If this is the first time that you’re listening, I can guarantee that you will take away some valuable pieces of information that will change your practice immediately. And if it’s the second or third or even fourth time that you might be listening, my hope is that you continue to take in some details that you may not have heard before.
[00:01:00] I will say it is truly painful to listen to myself from years past. And hopefully, the interviewing skills have evolved since then. And I will also apologize for the audio, which is not fantastic during this interview, but it is certainly quality enough that you can hear it and comprehended it quite well, I think, but it is not up to present-day standards. So a little bit of a caveat here.Without further ado, let me transition to my conversation from episode number 23 with Dr. Bryn Harris.
Hey, everybody. Welcome to The Testing Psychologist podcast, episode number 23.
Hey everybody. [00:02:00] Welcome to another episode of The Testing Psychologist podcast. I’m Dr. Jeremy Sharp, and I am here today with someone I am really excited to talk with. Dr. Bryn Harris is a professor at the University of Colorado Denver. We’re going to be talking all about culturally and linguistically responsive assessment. This is a huge, super important topic, and Bryn has a lot to say on this. This is where her research is and she’s focused on this for a long time. So, we’re going to have a great conversation.
Bryn, let me just say, welcome to the podcast and then I’ll do a formal introduction for you, okay?
Dr. Harris: Thank you. Glad to be here.
Dr. Sharp: Yeah. Glad to have you.
Bryn Harris, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the School Psychology doctoral program in the School of Education and Human Development at the University of Colorado Denver. Her primary research interests include the psychological assessment of bilingual learners, health disparities among bilingual children, particularly those with autism spectrum disorder, culturally and linguistically diverse gifted populations, and improving mental health access and opportunity within traditionally underserved school populations.
She regularly conducts international research, primarily in Mexico. Dr. Harris is the director and founder of the bilingual school psychology program at the University of Colorado Denver. She is also a bilingual (Spanish) licensed psychologist and nationally certified school psychologist.
So again, welcome.
Dr. Harris: Thank you.
Dr. Sharp: Absolutely. Like I said, I’m really excited to have our conversation today. I have to comment. It’s just such a small world here in the psychology world. We initially connected because one of my graduate student interns had you as a professor and she spoke so highly of you and the course, and [00:04:00] then we got to talking and emailing about maybe doing a podcast and it turns out that you did an internship with someone who was in my graduate school cohort and you know another woman who was in my cohort. I’m just always struck by how small this world is.
Dr. Harris: It really is.
Dr. Sharp: Yeah. So there’s some familiarity there already, even though we haven’t actually spoken before, which is always nice.
Dr. Harris: Yes, definitely. Well hopefully, we can meet in person at some point.
Dr. Sharp: Oh, I would love that. Yeah, absolutely.
Well, so for today, I think we have a lot to get to. You obviously have a wealth of experience with what you call culturally and linguistically responsive assessment. And I would love to just jump in and start chatting with you about that.
Dr. Harris: Sure.
Dr. Sharp: So just, generally speaking, I’m really curious how you got into this particular area. Can you speak to that?
Dr. Harris: Sure. So I think a lot of it started because I [00:05:00] have lived abroad. I’ve lived in different countries growing up: Argentina, Costa Rica, Mexico, a little bit of time in Guatemala. And those experiences really, first of all, I was able to achieve competency in Spanish from those experiences. But secondly, it just gave me a lot of different perspectives in terms of different ways that educational and mental health contexts operate in different countries. And so it’s always been fascinating for me to learn about that.
In college, I double-majored in psychology and Spanish. And I was really struck. In college, I was doing some research around eating disorders, and we started interviewing teachers around some of the issues that they were seeing in the classroom, even at the kindergarten level around some of the red flags around body image that started so early on. And at that point, it really struck me that I wanted to take [00:06:00] a preventative look at how we can implement intervention and best practice assessment, et cetera, if we can at first at the school level.
And so that’s been my entree into psychology. And then I did my master’s degree and Ph.D. in school psychology at Indiana University. I did a lot of clinical type work as well. And then I did a clinical internship at the health science center in Memphis where I did a lot of autism assessment and intellectual disability assessment, as well as some other rotations. So I’ve really focused a lot on children, mostly around underserved populations, and how we can really improve their access and care.
[00:07:00] Dr. Sharp: It sounds like you had a nice mix of research and clinical work going through grad school and internship. Where are you at these days in terms of the clinical versus research balance?Dr. Harris: That’s a great question. I am on a tenure track professor position. So, I’m an associate professor. My job is, technically, it’s supposed to be 40% research, 40% teaching, and 20% service. I do a day a week of clinical work, and I have a grant right now, so I’m not teaching quite as much. I’m doing a little bit more research than usual. So I would say right now I’m at about 60% research.
Dr. Sharp: Okay, that’s heavy, right? I’m just thinking about all those deadlines and all that writing. So, what does your one day a week of clinical work look like?
[00:08:00] Dr. Harris: I am doing one day a week at the Denver Language School, which is part of the Denver Public Schools. It’s an immersion school that’s a complete immersion in Spanish or Mandarin. And so, I’m doing an assessment for special education placement or not, of course. So a lot of the kids that are coming my way are possible rollout autism. And since the curriculum is done entirely in Spanish or Mandarin, I have really been able to utilize my expertise there in providing culturally responsive assessment. I really, really enjoy that work. That absolutely guides my research and my teaching. So I can’t imagine not doing the clinical work as well. I think it all goes together quite [00:09:00] nicely.Dr. Sharp: Absolutely. Yeah, I think it’s nice to have both sides, certainly. I know that in our program and I’m not sure if this is just a national push or what, but with a lot of the Ph.D. programs, it seems like many of our professors are not licensed as psychologists and that maybe leaves something to be desired when it comes to supervision and the actual clinical training. So, that’s really valuable to have both of those sides as you continue to develop the professorship, of course.
Dr. Harris: I completely agree. I know that APA really wants faculty members to be licensed as a psychologist. And I think we need to create a better way to incentivize licensure in academia because right now it’s not considered part of teaching research or service in most settings. So we need to figure out how we can integrate that and [00:10:00] basically prove to our leadership why it’s so important.
Dr. Sharp: Well, that could be a whole other conversation, I think. We’ll shut the lid on that can of worms for now. But it sounds like you’re doing a lot of good work. I wanted to check in just as we’re getting going, you politely corrected me as we were emailing back and forth. I was using the term culturally competent assessment, and you said, no, I like to say culturally and linguistically responsive. So, I’m just curious. What does that mean to you, and is there a difference between those terms that is semantically important?
Dr. Harris: Yes, that’s a great question. And it’s a hot topic in our field because cultural competence is still written in the literature and it’s not considered incorrect. It’s [00:11:00] more of where you are just personally in terms of what appeals to you. So, the reason that I don’t align with cultural competence is because the definition of competent entails that somebody would achieve a particular level of competence and then they would be competent to do that practice forever. So you obtain that information and you’re done basically.
So the people that are trying to use the word responsiveness, it’s really because this is an ever evolving professional development endeavor and just like any area of psychology, you’re always going to be learning. So, you’re never going to be fully competent. And so being responsive is being individualized, personable to that particular family, child, whoever it is that you’re working with [00:12:00] and what their needs are.
Dr. Sharp: Yeah, that totally makes sense. I haven’t thought of it like that, but the way you frame it, of course, you’re never going to be 100% there. Things are always changing and you have to adapt. Well, I appreciate that.
So, very basic question, it may be a dumb question, but I’m just going to ask it because that’s what I do sometimes. Why would you say culturally responsive assessment is important?
Dr. Harris: I think there are some legal and ethical issues around it. I mean, of course, first, we have, depending on your area, but we have APA ethics or different professional association ethical obligations that we need to provide culturally responsive assessment, and also the type of assessment that we’re doing needs to [00:13:00] provide accurate and valid results. So we need to make sure that we’re providing that for every type of person that we’re working with.
And then, there are also legal issues. We’ve had situations where, for example, children that are English language learners were given cognitive assessments in English, and English was not their native language. They weren’t fluent in English. And these assessments, of course, you and I know, if you’re going to give a child an assessment, they don’t understand, they’re probably going to score low. So, they qualified for ID and that was inaccurate. And so there have been multiple situations like that from a legal standpoint that have shown us that it is not ethical and we can also lose our license if we don’t comply with some of those ethical [00:14:00] recommendations. So that’s really important.
And then the other reason is that we want to make sure that we’re accurately assessing every person that we work with. If we aren’t providing culturally and linguistically responsive assessments, we can be misidentifying people, we could be missing identification in general. We could be missing out on early intervention services if we do that and really change the trajectory for this child or this person. So, I think those are the main reasons in my mind why we need to make sure we’re doing this.
Dr. Sharp: Sure. So it sounds like you’ve actually been involved or had contact with cases where someone administered assessment in the wrong language and that turned out poorly. Is that right?
Dr. Harris: Yes, absolutely. There’ve been multiple cases like this, and it’s absolutely unfortunate because a lot [00:15:00] of the times, especially when you’re thinking about, for example, immigrant populations or really underserved populations, they’re not as likely to know the ethical legal obligations and they’re not as likely to advocate for themselves. And so, that just puts another layer on this that we need to be filling that role as well, and be their advocates to make sure they’re getting the right assessment services.
Dr. Sharp: I wonder if that kind of flows into, I’m really curious about ways that clinicians might stumble into these mistakes. I would imagine none of these clinicians set out with the intent to get involved in a lawsuit and do the wrong thing. So, I’m curious., do you have ideas on just blind spots or ways that we might make these mistakes unintentionally and not be providing appropriate assessment?
[00:16:00] Dr. Harris: Absolutely. So first, I wanted to mention that I teach an entire class on this. So it’s hard to whittle it down into a few minutes, but I will definitely try to give an overview of the main areas that I think are problematic.So first of all, there are two main areas in an assessment. I’m going to really focus on children but I think that this is also absolutely applicable to adult populations. The two main areas are acculturation and language proficiency. So, if we’re looking at culture and language and their impact, we need to make sure that we are putting that into our body of evidence, into our assessment practice when we are evaluating these children.
So regarding acculturation, there are formal ways, there are standardized measures of acculturation, but [00:17:00] generally, I think that is really a hard thing to measure. The research behind it doesn’t show that there’s a lot of validity or reliability with these acculturation measures in general. And so I think the important thing is to evaluate acculturation in some way. I like to do that through interviews. So interviewing the child, interviewing the parent, really finding out about what their day looks like. For example, what kind of music do they like to listen to? What kind of TV shows are they listening to? Who are they hanging out with outside of school for, for example? What level of engagement does this family have with certain community groups?
I think that’s really important because we need to understand the cultural influences that these families have, and also the cultural expectations that these families may have too. [00:18:00] Just to give you an example, when we’re measuring adaptive behavior, we need to make sure that when we’re asking if a family has given the child the opportunity to do something or the expectation to do something on adaptive behavior, whether that has some cultural relevance as well.
We have very, very little research on this in terms of how particular cultural groups might fair differently than others on measures of adaptive behavior. But we have lots of research saying that there should be differences. And so, we need to make sure that we’re really looking into whether that score could be a factor of cultural beliefs around some behavioral expectations, for example. So I think that a thorough interview with a family, a lot of background [00:19:00] information about that child is going to be your most important factor in that interview.
Another thing that happens in the acculturation process when a child or an adult moves to the US or moves from one area of the country to another area, or even just another community within the same city, there’s an acculturation process that occurs. And for some people, it’s much harder to acculturate than others. And those symptoms can look a lot like mental health distress when it’s in fact part of a typical acculturation process.
So you need to make sure you need to be asking questions about that child or that family or whoever it is, what their perspective was around moving to another location or learning English for the first time. Those are [00:20:00] really big changes for people. So you want to make sure that you’re evaluating the impact of those.
And then, of course, the language proficiency piece. So we need to make sure that we’re understanding what level of English language proficiency, as well as native language proficiency that person has before determining what assessment measures we’re going to give.
The most common example given, and the one where there’s been the most legal impact has been around cognitive assessment. A lot of people will tell me, “Well, I can just give them a non-verbal assessment and then it won’t be an issue. And I do advocate for non-verbal and in some ways, but I want to make sure people know that all assessments including non-verbal assessments are not void of culture. We’re still creating the non-verbal assessment within our US mainstream culture if you will. And so we [00:21:00] still have a lot of cultural components, not to mention the way in which we use nonverbal assessment.
We give pantomime instructions in a non-verbal fashion. And some of those pantomime instructions are problematic for certain cultural groups. Thumbs up, for example, is different. And in some cultures, it’s rude to give a thumbs up. So we need to also be careful of knowing certain nonverbal gestures and whether those are culturally appropriate. But language proficiency will give you really good information about what type of cognitive assessment to give. So, if you’re trying to figure out whether a child can get a very language-loaded assessment or more of a nonverbal if you’re looking at it as a continuum, you need to know the language proficiency of that child.
You also have an obligation [00:22:00] to know what the level of linguistic demand is of the assessments that you’re giving. So for example, a WISC or a WAIS, those are going to be some of the most heavily language-loaded assessments. They require more language demands, so probably not the right choice to give to somebody that’s learning English. But we have other options that have less language and cultural loading. For kids, we often talk about the DAS and the KABC as being some of those choices.
I think it’s important to look at the manuals of these assessments, understand the theoretical underpinning. The people that created the DAS and the KABC created it in a way to try to minimize language and culture and the impact of prior schooling on the effects of cognitive assessment. So I think those are the big things.
And then [00:23:00] the last thing I wanted to mention is that a disability will only occur if a child is an English language learner, and will only occur in both languages. You can’t have a disability in English but not have it in a native language. So, that’s why it’s really important to get information about native language development.
I do a lot of work with autism. So for example, a child not speaking until the age of 3 is definitely a red flag, but I’ve had situations, I’ve looked into prior records, and so the child hasn’t spoken English by age 3 but they were only exposed to English for the first time at age 2, they were speaking a native language before that. So we should really be asking about native language as well in that regard because that really changes how that parent might respond to that.
Dr. Sharp: Of course, these are great points. So I have a [00:24:00] couple of maybe dumb questions, but I just resigned myself to asking dumb questions during the podcast.
One thing you talked about, you have to have some sense of language proficiency. Is that something that you would formally evaluate somehow before you decide how to measure cognitive, before going forward with the full assessment or is that just through an interview or how would you?
Dr. Harris: That’s a really great question. So if the child is younger, it’s pretty hard to evaluate any kind of language proficiency except for what the parent is telling you. So, I’d be asking questions about what percentage of the time is English spoken at home and the native language? Who’s the person or who are the people speaking that native language?
I’d really be trying to get a context for how much language input that child is getting in their native language. [00:25:00] And if it’s more than 50% of the time, then that’s when I would start to think, I need to either bring in a bilingual psychologist or an interpreter depending on what you’re trying to do. And so, that’s where I would start at an early age. Once the child is 5 years of age, in Colorado and nationwide, we have a federal law that every year if the child reports that another language besides English is spoken at home, then the school is required to give them a language proficiency assessment in English.
In Colorado, we use the WIDA ACCESS, and it’s used in over 30 states. And so you can always request the results from that assessment if you want to learn more about the child’s English language proficiency. But I think in general, it’s a hard thing to research in terms of how quickly someone acquires English. [00:26:00] But the research shows us that usually, it’s about 5 to 7 years, but that really is if they’re in an English immersion environment. So when we think about kids that are in school and they’re learning English but then they’re coming home and the input is the native language, it might take longer for them to learn English.
And there’s a big myth out there that learning two languages is confusing or it might stunt language development, and that’s a huge myth. So we really want to encourage families to keep speaking their native language. It’s such an incredible asset for children.
Dr. Sharp: Oh, that’s good to hear. Yeah. I’ve heard anecdotally from families whose native language was not English that there was some concern about that. So, that’s nice to pass that along.
So I did want to check-in. You mentioned the options of getting a bilingual psychologist [00:27:00] or an interpreter. What situations would each of those be appropriate?
Dr. Harris: Yep. Okay. So, there’s another legal situation that you want to be careful with an interpreter. And that is that an interpreter cannot interpret assessments. I’m sorry if I’m preaching to the choir here, but we have had situations where, for example, the family speaks Russian and there’s no WISC that’s been standardized in Russian. So the interpreter interprets every single question while a psychologist is administering it as well, but of the English WISC into Russian. So that’s problematic for a lot of reasons. It voids standardization. It also changes the level of complexity of the question when you translate a question into another language.
Let me give you a really easy example [00:28:00] from an academic assessment perspective. So, if you’re asking the child the Spanish word, I’m going to put you on the spot here. So do you know the Spanish word for dog?
Dr. Sharp: Perro.
Dr. Harris: Yes. Okay. So the word dog in English is one of the first words that a child learns. It’s pretty easy to learn, and usually, by 18 months, most children are saying something around, dog, but Perro in Spanish is much harder to say. It has the rolling Rs. It’s a word that children don’t usually learn very early on at all. And so if you’re trying to translate that word into Spanish and measure whether that child is able to say that word or know that word, it’s a completely different question, right? So we don’t recommend interpreting assessments. We need to use assessments that have been standardized.
That being said, we have a long way [00:29:00] to go in terms of test publishers really need to be more inclusive in the standardization practices, even if they want to standardize with subgroups of populations, that would be helpful. We don’t have very much information about how many groups do fair on certain assessments. So that’s something that we need to advocate in terms of for the test publishers. But that’s a big area.
When you’re using an interpreter, an interpreter really should be used for interviews with the family interviews, interviews with the children or whoever it is. This more of the informal measures and interpreters are really great for that. And then, a bilingual psychologist would be brought in when you believe based on the history that you’ve obtained that the person is more dominant in their native language and that you would be getting [00:30:00] more information from them through a native language assessment, that’s when a bilingual psychologist would be best. I would definitely recommend having a resource bank of some of the people in your area that are bilingual psychologists and using them also as consultants at times. When you’re not sure whether a bilingual assessment is warranted, hopefully, you can reach out to one of them and get some more information.
Dr. Sharp: Yeah. Well, I know at least in our area here that bilingual Spanish psychologists are in high demand for doing testing. I get a lot of those requests and really don’t have anyone to send them to at least in Fort Collins. Denver is relatively close.
Dr. Harris: We have a very similar situation. I can’t even believe how few bilingual psychologists we have. I think, as we train [00:31:00] future psychologists, we really need to tell them about this area and their need, but we also need to, as psychologists that are monolingual, we can’t just say, oh, well, this person should just go to a bilingual psychologist because I don’t speak Spanish or whatever it is.
We have an obligation to those children or families to really figure out whether they do need a bilingual assessment or not, and whether you could work in collaboration with a bilingual psychologist, maybe the bilingual psychologist just needs to do the cognitive testing, but you could do everything else, but we really need to make sure that the onus is on my monolingual psychologist to be culturally and linguistically responsive as well.
Dr. Sharp: Sure. So I know we’ve talked a lot about language, which is super important obviously, but I think a lot of us maybe get stuck in more gray [00:32:00] areas where the language piece seems intact, maybe as best we can tell, English, they’re very proficient and that’s okay. What are some other culturally responsive ways to do an assessment or maybe things to be aware of that fall outside the language realm that are maybe less obvious. Does that make sense?
Dr. Harris: Sure. I think that it’s important to learn about the cultural experiences of the groups that you’re working with. It’s hard to generalize any kind tips because, so for example, there are some textbooks you’ve probably read many of them that we’ll spend a chapter on African-American populations, a chapter on Latino populations and that’s always been a big issue for me because there’s just like, for you and I, we might be very similarly. [00:33:00] Our background might be very similar, but we might have very different cultural expectations. And so, we need to make sure that we’re not generalizing any of the families we work with.
I think if you’re specializing in an area, for example, since I specialize in ASD, I think you need to really understand how different countries and different cultures have beliefs around social reciprocity, for example. So for example, in the research, when would a parent first come to you with initial concerns?
Well, in the US, initial concerns around ASD are almost always language-based. So the child hasn’t spoken by 2 years and parents are concerned. Well in other countries that actually is very different. In India, parents are [00:34:00] often reporting first initial concern around social reciprocity. So, I think it’s important to know what the values and expectations are of that family before moving into your assessment and your intervention recommendations, all of that.
Dr. Sharp: Okay. I know you do a lot of work with ASD and I was doing an ADOS the other day, and this has happened before, but there’s the birthday party activity. This particular assessment was with an Arabic family, and it just happened, as I was setting up the birthday party, I just thought and I turned to the mom. I was like, do you celebrate birthdays? Has this kid ever seen a birthday party? And she was like, no. All of a sudden it’s like, well, that’s what we need to consider that then. And that’s happened in different [00:35:00] scenarios with different activities there in the ADOS, particularly.
Dr. Harris: Yes, absolutely. I’ve had lots of conversations with people about the ADOS in that very same way. And I think that the fact that you’re thinking about it and even asking parents about this, puts you miles beyond a lot of people because the way, and I’m not trying to make other people feel bad by any stretch of the imagination, but the way that the ADOS is portrayed in the literature as being the gold standard, really, I think makes people question it less. And so I think the fact that you have that awareness and are asking those questions is awesome. So keep that up.
Dr. Sharp: Very well, thank you. I’ll take that. Sometimes, I have my moments.
Dr. Harris: Sure.
Dr. Sharp: I know that, gosh, our time has gone by really fast, which just means we’re talking about some important, pretty good stuff. But I wanted to just check-in. [00:36:00] Do you have any thoughts on writing culturally responsive reports? Is there anything to consider there? And then, we can maybe move to just ideas for training or resources and that kind of thing.
Dr. Harris: That’s a really good question. So, the culturally responsive reports, I think the most important thing is, who is your audience and for most of us practicing, that would be the client or the parent. So making sure that your reports include really parent-friendly language. I’ve had lots of families come to me with reports that they’re like, can you please let me know what is in this report? I don’t understand it. And that usually there’s a lot of acronyms included, a lot of high-level professional language. So we want to make sure that we’re writing the reports [00:37:00] for future intervention. So it needs to be understandable.
The other thing that I would really want you to do in being culturally responsive is to understand your own biases and stereotypes that might impact you in that report writing. Unfortunately, there’s lots of research showing that people have lower expectations for certain cultural groups to be able to perform certain tasks. We have research showing that, for example, the same child, a white child and an African-American child, the same vignette, the African-American child is more likely to be seen as having ADHD versus the white child that seemed to have behavioral issues, but not to the extent of ADHD.
And so, why are we thinking this way? We’re thinking in a deficit based lens. [00:38:00] And so, how can we write our reports that are really strength-based and really talk more about the symptoms or the behaviors or whatever it may be and not necessarily focus on all of the problems, right? So, I think that would be kind of my overarching recommendation.
Dr. Sharp: Okay. So if individuals are interested in learning more about culturally responsive or linguistically responsive assessment, what would you recommend? Maybe we could take it in two parts: a beginner level resource list and then, someone who’s been in the field and has some experience but would like to take it to the next level, so to speak.
Dr. Harris: Sure. So if you’re a beginner, then I think one of the best things you can do is look into a university in your area or a lot of people are doing online programs as [00:39:00] well, but taking a class on multicultural considerations. There are lots of different titles, but the focus of the class would really be on understanding your own experiences and how they can impact the work that you do with families because we all have biases, we all have limitations, racism, lots of different things. So I think the first thing is to make sure that you have a foundation in that area.
Definitely, the next thing really depends on your area of psychology. There are lots of different professional organizations that I would recommend. So for example, The National Latino Psychological Association is affiliated with APA. If you’re a neuropsychologist, maybe the Hispanic Neuropsychological Society. There are tons of different interest groups within your particular [00:40:00] field in terms of your professional organization.
So, I would recommend getting involved with those, going to conferences and then going to the special sessions that are hosted by these interest groups or Division. So Division 45 of APA, for example. Division 45 of APA also has a journal: The Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology journal. That would be a great place to go and see some of the recent findings related to this, and a lot of other associations also have journals. The National Latino Psychological Association does too.
And then, if you really want more advanced knowledge, I think the key is doing some peer mentoring and consultation. So if you could arrange some ways to, you know, maybe monthly [00:41:00] have even a call with people in other areas that have similar interests that are doing similar work and really talk about cases, talk about how people have have looked at culture in this regard, that kind of thing, I think that when you get to be more advanced than you have that foundational knowledge, you really need that practical application.
People at universities like myself, I’m always happy to get emails from folks. I have this case, this is what’s going on, what would you suggest I do? Please, don’t hesitate to contact people. And if you read an article and you think, oh, this is so interesting, contact the author, ask them if you could talk to them for 15 minutes. Or if you’re going to a conference and you see, this person is presenting on this particular topic that fascinates you, contact them and see if they can have coffee with you for a little bit during the conference.
I think the important thing is reaching out because we don’t really have tons of [00:42:00] research in this area yet. And so really finding ways to improve professionally within your own skillset is what’s going to be most important.
Dr. Sharp: Sure. Thanks. I feel like that’s super helpful. Those were like very concrete ideas on how to pursue some more training. I think that’s a nice segue actually with reaching out. If people want to get in touch with you or learn more about what you’re doing, what’s the best way to get in touch with you?
Dr. Harris: I would love to get emails from anyone, any questions, I love hearing from people. So, the best way to reach me is my email, which is, bryn.harris@ucdenver.edu.
Dr. Sharp: Okay. Awesome. And I’ll definitely have that in the show notes, along with a lot [00:43:00] of the other resources that you mentioned here during our talk today.
I said it before, but I’ll say it again. I feel like this time went by super fast. There’s a ton of information that could have followed up and asked more about, and I’m sure you had a similar experience in trying to convey a lot of this info.
Dr. Harris: Yes. Well, I really enjoy talking with you and I just want to commend you for broaching this topic in your podcast, because I know it’s not easy. A lot of us go into psychology, we really like assessment because we know it’s black and white, they either get a two, a one or zero and we can score it. And in this regard, there’s a lot of gray area. I think some people shy away from this topic. So thank you for broaching it.
Dr. Sharp: Yeah, of course, I think it is important. And honestly, a lot of this, the desire to talk more about it comes from my own recognizing that I’m not, [00:44:00] incredibly well versed with it. And I think, if it’s happening for me, it’s probably happening for others and we got to be talking about this. So I really, really appreciate your time. This has been a great conversation. And I appreciate all the resources you’ve shared with us.
Dr. Harris: Any time, please email me. And thanks for continuing on your own journey as well.
Dr. Sharp: Oh yeah, of course. Well, take care of Bryn. Thanks again.
Dr: Harris: You too. Take care. Bye.
Dr. Sharp: Bye-bye.
All right, y’all thanks so much for tuning into this replay of my interview with Dr. Bryn Harris from a few years ago. I got to say I’ve kept up with Bryn and stayed in touch with her over the years, and have reached out a few times regarding case consultation and she is just as kind and compassionate and knowledgeable as she presents here in the podcast.
So Bryn, if you are listening, thanks so much again for the support over the years. And if any of you get the [00:45:00] chance to interact with her, I would certainly recommend it. She’s a fantastic individual and clinician and researcher.
I haven’t said much about the CE credits for the podcast here lately. So I will give a shout-out to athealth, athealth.com is where you can find all of The Testing Psychologist clinical episodes, and those are available for CE credits. You take a short quiz and get credit for podcasts that you are already listening to. You can use the code TTP 10 to get a discount off any CE credits that you purchase, not just The Testing Psychologist episodes. So check that out athealth.com, just search for The Testing Psychologist.
All right. Y’all, take care. I will be back in short fashion with brand new clinical and business episodes, and I will catch you then.