Psychometrically Validated Tools for Adolescent Mental Health Assessment
Introducing the MIASA: a multi-informant assessment system designed to address a critical gap in adolescent care.
Standard child and adult measures fail to capture developmental phenomena unique to adolescence—leaving clinicians with incomplete data during a critical intervention window. The MIASA is designed to close this gap, providing comprehensive evaluation across substance use trajectories, trauma exposure, identity formation, family systems stress, and emerging psychopathology.
The MIASA gathers assessment data from three critical informants: adolescents provide insight into internal experiences and peer contexts, parents observe home functioning and developmental history, and teachers report on academic performance and peer interactions. This triangulated approach yields comprehensive, ecologically valid data that strengthens diagnostic precision and treatment decision-making.
Why Providers
Choose MIASA
Multi-Informant Integration
Adolescent presentation is inherently multi-contextual. The MIASA consolidates parallel data streams from youth, caregivers, and educators into a cohesive assessment profile, allowing clinicians to efficiently identify patterns, resolve discrepancies, and formulate targeted interventions.
Adolescent and caregiver modules require less than 25 minutes to complete; teacher assessment requires just 5 minutes, respecting educational setting time constraints. Cross-platform access enables completion on any device. Automated follow-up protocols maximize completion rates while intuitive interfaces minimize staff workload.
Built for Today’s Practice
Supports Modern Needs
The MIASA captures contemporary clinical phenomena: problematic technology and social media use, trauma exposure and sequelae, identity development challenges, and family systems stress—ensuring assessment tools remain responsive to evolving adolescent presentations.
Protected Clinical Data
The MIASA uses modern web technologies to ensure high security while making clinically useful information easy to access. The platform offers innovative ways to display and integrate results from multiple informants.
MIASA Assessment Areas
Negative Affect
Depression, anxiety, anger, emotional distress, post-traumatic stress, weight concerns, social withdrawal, peer rejection, autistic sensitivity, unusual thinking, and somatization.
Acting Out
Patterns of acting out that include negative peer influence, disobedience, substance abuse, social media addiction and school misbehavior.
School Disengagement
Traits that may impact school functioning, such as ADHD, academic under-performance, over involvement with video gaming.
Vulnerability
Traits related to low resiliency, including low self-esteem, social isolation, family isolation.
MIASA Concept Map
The concept map displays results as percentages of endorsed items without using numerical statistics. It provides a visual model showing how diverse clinical issues relate to one another.
Once you click a scale, you can view detailed item-level responses, as shown in the example below.
Detailed Item View
As illustrated, responses are organized by informant type: youth self-report appears at the top, caregiver observations in the center, and teacher ratings at the bottom.
Color-coded gradients highlight clinically significant elevations, enabling efficient data review and interpretation.
MIASA: School
T-score Charts
MIASA: School
The MIASA also offers T-score graphs normed on contemporary community samples that reflect population base rates for mental health problems.
Each chart can display up to 13 raters simultaneously, allowing clinicians to compare all perspectives at a glance.
Diagnostic Predictors
The app provides diagnostic predictors across seven empirically developed scales, which integrate scores from all clinical scales to predict parent-reported conditions.
Results are presented as relative likelihoods for each diagnosis, including the likelihood of no problems.
The MIASA is offered in two versions: Clinical and School. The Clinical version includes sensitive psychosocial and behavioral content suitable for therapeutic settings, while the School version focuses on academic and social functioning. Clinicians can customize either version by removing scales that are not relevant or suitable for their community or practice context.
Clinical and School Versions
MIASA: Clinical
Youth Questionnaire featuring 39 scales and 224 items.
It includes a Family Dysfunction domain that evaluates both historical and current family challenges, such as:
Historical experiences of neglect and abuse (ACES-like questions).
Current family difficulties, including ongoing abuse, exposure to domestic violence, substance use in the home, and family instability.
In addition, the Clinical version includes scales measuring:
Gender-related issues
Low-intimacy sexual behavior
Criminal behavior
MIASA: School
Youth Questionnaire with 24 scales and 143 items.
Key areas assessed include:
Academic engagement and performance
Social-emotional functioning
Peer relationships
Behavioral patterns relevant to school
MIASA is rooted in more than 30 years of clinical research.
Derived from the Adolescent Behavioral Questionnaire (ABQ), it has been validated across inpatient, school, and community populations.
Validation Research
Our most recent studies include:
A national normative sample of 700 adolescents, parents, and teachers across diverse backgrounds.
Validation research with over 1,100 parent/youth dyads comparing youth responses with clinical diagnoses.
Longitudinal outcome studies linking adolescent scores with adult mental health and functioning.