oa Many Ways to Play a Review of Alternative Approaches to Play Assessment

This paper reviews alternative approaches to play assessment. The review covers both discrete (conventional) and continuous (unconventional) plays. There is a significant literature on the former topic (and also a range of more or less well established methods/approaches). For continuous resources we are looking at an emerging field that can benefit from a systematic review -- in order to be able to both adopt and adapt from assessment of discrete resources. The main body of the paper provides a review of alternative play assessment methods. The review concludes with a summary overview of key differences and similarities between the approaches used for assessing respectively discrete and continuous resources. Some of the key dimensions considered are interpretation of shared play risks and conditional risks, how to model recovery, the key inputs from analogs and the role of the assessment unit.