Adolescent/Adult Sensory Profile

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Introduction: The Adolescent/Adult Sensory Profile (AASP) is a standardized assessment that measures the sensory processing needs of adolescents to adults from ages 11 and up (Dunn, 2014). The AASP is a 60-item questionnaire gathers information about the adolescent’s or adult’s responsiveness to various sensory stimuli and then identifies the processing deficits within the sensory systems that may disable the individual from participating in daily activities. Brown & Dunn (2002) state this is to increase the individual’s awareness around their personal sensory behaviours, and identifying what their sensory preferences were in regards to understanding sensory processing. The purpose of the AASP is to provide insight and information …show more content…
Using a rating scale of one to five with the responses ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree; there are several section with questions relating to taste and smell processing, movement processing, visual processing, touch processing, activity level and auditory processing (Dunn, 2014). This helps with identifying the individual’s sensory preferences and enables us to understand the client’s neurological threshold and their behavioural responses to elicit effective sensory intervention techniques. Brown and Dunn (2010) compared the Sensory Profile scores from children at home and school and this showed that the avoiding and seeking quadrants in both contexts were significantly correlated, suggesting that children's reactions of being overwhelmed by sensory experiences were similar at home and at school. The AASP would often be administered when working under the Model of Human Occupation (MOHO) as this model main focus is around the human as a whole system so this is an effective model to use when working within the mental health system as it does not look at the illness but the occupational performance dysfunction (Cole, 2012). MOHO has three subsystems; volition, habituation and performance capacity these provide an understanding how occupations are chosen, engaged in and finally performed. This enables us to look at the individuals as a human system seeing their daily functioning involving output to the environment,