Assessment, Development, and Validation

In the past two decades, college counseling centers in the United States observed a sub-stantial increase in the levels of psychopa-thology and symptom severity among college students (Benton, Robertson, Tseng, Newton, & Benton, 2003). Researchers showed that an increasing number of students experienced psychological problems related to academic skills, relationships, stress, anxiety, depres-sion, and drug use (Benton et al., 2003; O’Malley, Wheeler, Murphey, O’Connell, & Waldo, 1990). However, despite such changes, counseling centers lacked a low-cost, standardized, efficient, and psychomet-rically sound instrument assessing a range of mental health symptoms tailored specifically to the needs of college students. The original development of the Counseling Center Assess-ment of Psychological Symptoms (CCAPS) represents an effort to establish such an instrument. The history and development of the CCAPS-62 was described in detail elsewhere (Locke et al., 2011). In short, the CCAPS-62 was developed to create a relatively brief mul-tidimensional measure suitable for routine use in college counseling centers with college stu-dents. Though there are similar measures already in the literature, existing measures do not meet all these needs of counseling centers. Several of the most popular self-report mea-sures used in counseling and psychotherapy 432642 MEC45310.1177/0748175611432642Locke et al.Measuremen