1. Assessment of Families
Chapter 9
Robyn Munford and Jackie Sanders

2. Background
Social work practice with families has changed over time. The societal context of illness, disability and needs for assistance have also changed.
Eg. Disabled children are no longer removed and institutionalized as early as possible, with families counseled to forget and move on
Support for problems and issues is no longer confined to charity cases but can include foci of education and social change as well as others.
Human rights and social justice are central principles to social work practice

3. Evidence on Assessment of Families
In the family therapy field a number of therapeutic approaches in a range of settings have been adopted including:
structural family therapy, narrative approaches, multisystemic therapy, just therapy, psychosocial approaches that connect the inner self to wider environment and system issues.
Maintenance approaches typically are not associated with intense therapeutic work, focusing instead on the here and now and the immediate resolution of problems.
Power imbalances are potential reasons why families are facing challenges, and some criticism of the therapeutic and maintenance approaches include that neither address these imbalances.
A reflective approach enables a social worker to know how assessment fits within the other aspects of the helping process and to be explicit about the ideas that are informing assessment decisions
Also requires that the social worker knows how to use the evidence available and make informed decisions about problems and possible solutions.

4. Diversity
“family” is a term that is used broadly to define life contexts, but in reality is a unique identifier that must be individualized through direct assessment clients.
The assessment process must explicitly allow for the family to articulate its own sense of family and to identify key values they have as a family unit.
Cultural competency does not end with defining what family means to clients. It includes recognizing how the clients’ definition fits within the dominant paradigms of family.
The environment that the family resides in can directly impact the opportunities that the family has available to them.
The key challenge here is to recognize how the common themes of making available material and social resources and achieving health and well-being for all family members are constructed within the global economy and have different meanings across different contexts.

5. The Assessment Process within Social Work Practice
The microlevel is concerned with direct work with the family. The focus is on working with the family system and its networks.
Assessment considers the family and includes an exploration of the systems that impact on family life in all its diversity.
Assessment tools:
Systems Assessment
Assessment of family history
Asking questions differently
Discovering successful change strategies
The mezzolevel expands the assessment process to include organizations, communities and neighborhoods.
The worker pays attention to identifying the capacity of wider systems around the family and developing interventions plans at this level.
Community profiling
Organizational mapping and profiling
Asset-based inventories
Structural analysis approaches

6. The Assessment Process within Social Work Practice Continued
The macro level involves and assessment of the structures and policies that impact family life and may involve the social worker in advocacy roles and in policy analysis critique.
Assessment tools:
Policy analysis, development and critique
Advocacy
Research and evaluation
The strengths based assessment of the family can provide opportunities for exploring both problems and resources within the family.
An understanding that a focus on strengths does not diminish the importance of identifying risk and safety issues and finding ways to protect clients from harm and causing harm, is necessary for this approach.
Effective social work assessment will include knowing how to achieve deep understandings of family life in a range of contexts on a range of levels…while not all social workers will be involved at all levels, it is essential that they understand how the relationships within these levels and the interactions between them will impact on the everyday experiences of families.