Abstract
The advent of managed health care has challenged rehabilitation professionals to guide
their clients toward functionally meaningful outcomes in the least amount of time
possible and to justify the evidence base for their intervention approaches. The ability
to relate personal narratives in everyday contexts lies at the core of communicative
functionality, but feasible clinical assessment of narrative has proven elusive. The
purpose of this article is to offer an evidence-based framework for guiding assessments
of the personal narratives of adults with aphasia, within a managed care model of
service delivery. A literature-based model of narrative functionality is proposed,
and a targeted set of criterion-referenced measures and behavioral observations derived
from this model are suggested as potential metrics of narrative functionality. The
authors do not intend to prescribe exact methods of narrative evaluation, but rather
to suggest possible directions for professionals to develop evidence-based clinical
narrative analysis tailored to the functional assessment needs of their clients across
a variety of service settings.
Keywords
Narrative - assessment - aphasia - managed care
