Integrating Family Assessment Into Social Work Practice
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Auteurs : Diane Reichertz ; Harvy FrankelSource :
- Research on Social Work Practice [ 1049-7315 ] ; 1993-07.
Abstract
Despite the existence of a number of potentially useful instruments for assessing family functioning, most social workers rely on idiosyncratic indicators when assessing clients' families. This article demonstrates the applicability of a classification system for the Family Environment Scale (FES) that requires no computer skill or mathematical expertise. Data from a randomly selected sample of 58 client families were subjected to the classification system, which yielded five distinct groups and accounted for 83% of the sample. When combined with clinical observations, the descriptions of the groups can aid in planning interventions and organizing services.
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DOI: 10.1177/104973159300300301
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This article demonstrates the applicability of a classification system for the Family Environment Scale (FES) that requires no computer skill or mathematical expertise. Data from a randomly selected sample of 58 client families were subjected to the classification system, which yielded five distinct groups and accounted for 83% of the sample. 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This article demonstrates the applicability of a classification system for the Family Environment Scale (FES) that requires no computer skill or mathematical expertise. Data from a randomly selected sample of 58 client families were subjected to the classification system, which yielded five distinct groups and accounted for 83% of the sample. 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This article demonstrates the applicability of a classification system for the Family Environment Scale (FES) that requires no computer skill or mathematical expertise. Data from a randomly selected sample of 58 client families were subjected to the classification system, which yielded five distinct groups and accounted for 83% of the sample. 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This article demonstrates the applicability of a classification system for the Family Environment Scale (FES) that requires no computer skill or mathematical expertise. Data from a randomly selected sample of 58 client families were subjected to the classification system, which yielded five distinct groups and accounted for 83% of the sample. When combined with clinical observations, the descriptions of the groups can aid in planning interventions and organizing services.</italic></p></abstract><custom-meta-wrap><custom-meta xlink:type="simple"><meta-name>sagemeta-type</meta-name><meta-value>Journal Article</meta-value></custom-meta><custom-meta xlink:type="simple"><meta-name>search-text</meta-name><meta-value>243 Integrating Family Assessment Into Social Work Practice SAGE Publications, Inc.1993DOI: 10.1177/104973159300300301 Diane Reichertz McGill University Harvy Frankel University of Manitoba Despite the existence of a number of potentially useful instruments for assessing family functioning, most social workers rely on idiosyncratic indicators when assessing clients' families. This article demonstrates the applicability of a classification system for the Family Environment Scale (FES) that requires no computer skill or mathematical expertise. Data from a randomly selected sample of 58 client families were subjected to the classification system, which yielded five distinct groups and accounted for 83% of the sample. When combined with clinical observations, the descriptions of the groups can aid in planning interventions and organizing services. The importance of a rapid and accurate assessment of family life is a crucial factor for an ecological approach to social work practice with children and families. Clinicians and researchers have struggled for many years to find ways of increasing cross-fertilization and interchange between their two professional areas. Researchers, in their domain, have developed a variety of family assessment instruments. Most social workers, however, continue to make clinical assessments intuitively, using an idiosyncratic set of indicators to identify targets for intervention. Although this process may allow for sufficient depth and complexity to proceed with clinical intervention, it also contains some serious limitations. Without a consistent and explicit schema for conducting family assessments, social workers may have difficulty in recognizing similarities and differences among the clients and families in their own caseloads or within the caseloads of their professional teammates. At the level of individual families, clinical impressions can be anchored or interpreted within the context provided by a family assessment instrument. At the team or agency level, for example, it is vitally important, both Authors' Note: Correspondence may be addressed to Diane Reichertz, School of Social Work, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, H3A 2A7, Canada. Research on Soctal Work Pncboe. Vol. 3 No. 3, July 1993 243-257 C 1993 Sage Pubhcations, Inc. 244 clinically and for planning purposes, to realize with confidence, that a preponderance of families in a given unit or area are characterized by a pattern of extremely high conflict as opposed to another area in which cases may demonstrate a pattern of disorganization. Levels of generalization such as these are particularly important for the process of formulating patterns of intervention with families who have similar structural or organizational features. The potential value of family assessment instruments continues to be neglected by social workers, despite the existence of a variety of easily accessible instruments for measuring family functioning (e.g., Beavers, Hampson, & Hulgus, 1985; Epstein, Baldwin, & Bishop, 1983; Hudson, 1982; Kolevzon & Green, 1987; Moos & Moos, 1976; Olson et al., 1985; Skinner, Santa-Barbara, & Steinhauer, 1983; Touliatos, Perlmutter, & Strauss, 1990). Their use appears to be hampered by a perception that such devices are meant only for researchers who are able to access large samples and conduct complex statistical analyses. The Family Environment Scale (FES) (Moos & Moos, 1976) is an instrument that can be used for both clinical and research purposes and can be hand scored on a case-by-case basis with a template. This article describes a simple nonstatistical system for organizing data collected through the use of the FES into groups of similar families (Billings & Moos, 1982) that are then used to anchor the clinical impressions of a subgroup of families from a community-based child welfare and family service setting. The system's unique practicality for clinicians stems from an analytic procedure that is based on a set of logical steps for differentiating one type of family from another on the basis of the FES. These features make the methodology available to line workers, who may either lack computer resources or perceive more sophisticated procedures as too cumbersome. This relatively simple methodology may also appeal to administrators because there are minimal associated direct and indirect costs. METHOD Clients A total of 58 families were randomly selected from the family service intake of a child and family service agency, over a 3-month period. The agency has two offices, one located in the central core of the city of Montreal and the other in a working-class suburb. Of the predominantly Caucasian 245 sample, slightly less than one quarter (23%) were Black. Although a large majority of the families were Canadian, 28% were immigrants from Jamaica, Guyana, Italy, Greece, Portugal, and Poland (at least the parental generation). The sample consisted of a high proportion of single-parent families (55%). There was also a high rate of unemployment among adults (38%), with almost one half of the parents (49%) reporting less than high school education. Presenting problems included behavior problems at home (breaking curfews, general disobedience, and running away); problems at school (truancy, disruptiveness, and achievement difficulties); minor delinquency (shoplifting, trespassing, loitering, and minor vandalism); parent-child conflict ; and transitional problems relating, primarily, to separation and divorce. Family Environment Scale The FES was administered to all family members who were at least 12 years of age (n = 138 individuals). The FES is a 90-item, true/false self-report questionnaire consisting of 10 subscales that tap different elements of the family's social environment (Fuhr, Moos, & Dishotsky, 1981). The FES is available in a test booklet with a separate answer sheet that can be hand scored using a template (Moos & Moos, 1981 ). Scoring simply involves adding the number of Xs showing through the template in each column. This method produces a score for each subscale. The total provides a raw score for each questionnaire. The questionnaires for each family member are added together to calculate the family mean for each subscale. These, in turn, can be converted to standard scores that are based on a total of 100 points. Tables of available standard scores facilitate comparisons between the sample (present) with Moos's sample. The FES has been widely used, with approximately 200 publications describing its application with families experiencing a broad range of problems (Touliatos et al.,1990). Normative data based on 1,125 normal and 500 distressed families is included in the second edition of the manual (Moos & Moos, 1976). Although the adequacy of its psychometric properties has recently been questiohed (Roosa & Beals, 1990), the developers of the FES review over 150 studies as evidence of construct, concurrent, and predictive validity. They also maintain that content validity has been demonstrated conceptually and empirically. Internal consistency reliabilities for the 10 subscales are reported to range from .61 to .78. Test-retest correlations range from .68 to .86 after 2 months, .54 to .91 after 4 months, and .52 to .89 after 1 year (Moos & Moos, 1976). The videotaped clinical assessments and treatment interviews of a subsample (n = 22) were reviewed by the authors as a means of providing them 246 with the clinical data that would normally be available to line social workers using the assessment and classification system described in this article. These data were used in the clinical impressions that accompany the descriptions of family types and are illustrative of the potential for enriching the profiles generated by the FES. They are not intended as corroboration of the results of the classification system or the FES. Assessment Procedures All family members, aged 12 or older, completed the FES during their first meeting with a social worker. Each questionnaire was scored individually by hand to obtain a basic score for each subscale. Following the procedure designed by Billings and Moos (1982), the subscale scores were averaged among family members to obtain a mean family score for each subscale. The family subscale scores were then standardized according to the tables provided by Moos and Moos (1976). The standardized scores for each family were recorded on index cards, which were easily sorted according to the classification rules described in Table 1. RESULTS Billings and Moos (1982) present a method for deriving family typologies based on FES scores. Their work was based on a sample of randomly selected families from census tracts in San Francisco (n = 267). According to this method, similar families are identified through the application of a set of hierarchical rules that categorize families according to their dominant characteristics, as reflected by FES subscale scores. These rules are described in the appendix. Categories 3, 8, and 9 were created by the application of the hierarchical steps to the clinical population used in this study but did not appear in the community sample used by Billings and Moos (1982). The logic of this scheme categorizes families according to their dominant subscale score. Beginning with the personal growth dimension, each family is categorized according to the first subscale on which it scores more than 60 (converted subscale score). This is followed by the same process for the subscales that make up the relationship dimension and the system maintenance dimension. Each subscale is considered in the order listed in the FES classification rules described in Table 1. The classification process can be refined by adding a second subscale that must be scored at a level greater than 60 or less than 50 if the logic used by Billings and Moos (1982) is 247 0 c 2 e CJ .t ! o u en c I ::E 2 i . .0 2 en ., en w u. .... tit m ~C- 4 C6 0 v~ Q U 0 Q 0 cc; a ai Q CD C) ..9! 0 U J::: Lf) d t!? a f/) V5 9 a s f a C) c +:3 "3 f/) c 0 o E ,g w m :õ .!!! .IZ as .!!l Q) 'a en C Q) E c 0 .> c w ~E If CD s= aš 248 followed. Structured and unstructured moral-religious families are examples. An additional example can be drawn from the category, support-oriented families. This family type could be divided into cohesion-oriented families (cohesion is > 60 and cohesion is > expressiveness and < conflict) and expressive-oriented families (expressiveness > 60 and expressiveness > cohesion and < conflict). Using the Billings and Moos (1982) classification system with this sample generated several additional family types that had not appeared in their sample. These included recreation-oriented (active-recreation > 60 and active-recreation > moral-religious orientation), organization-oriented (organization > 60 and organization > control), and control-oriented families (control > 60). The application of the classification rules generated five family types, which accounted for approximately 83% of the sample. The remaining 17% fell into other family types that were considered too small to yield meaningful descriptions. They included moral-religious-oriented families (structured and unstructured types), support-oriented families (expressive type), and organization-oriented families. Means and standard deviations are reported in Table 1. The following family categories are presented in the order established by the use of each successive classification rule. They are presented with the clinical impressions drawn from our observation of the assessment and treatment of representative families. Where appropriate, comparisons are drawn between these findings and the groups identified by Billings and Moos (1982), who used a similar methodology with a community sample, and Moos and Moos (1976), who employed cluster analysis to group clinical and nonclinical families according to their FES scores. Achievement-Oriented Families The 10 families in this category made up 17.2% of the sample. Their most striking features include a strong emphasis on accomplishment and competition, considerable value on the process of structuring family life and establishing clear rules and procedures, and very little concern with the encouragement of individual thought and action. Family relationships were experienced as highly conflictual, with members feeling unsupported and disconnected from the family as a whole. Moos and Moos (1976) identified a similar group and hypothesized that the combination of a strong emphasis on achievement-orientation and system- maintenance issues with a minimal value on independence is indicative of families who value achievement accomplished by conformity rather than 249 self-sufficiency. Similarly, Billings and Moos (1982) identified 11.2% of their sample as families who emphasized achievement in the context of high family organization and control. The achievement-oriented families in this study were mainly single-parent families with adolescent children who presented difficulties at home or at school. The clinical picture suggests that the emphasis on achievement, dependency, and family structure had been adaptive when the children were young and the family constituted the child's primary reference group. Problems emerged with the child's transition into adolescence and the difficulties often associated with the establishment of a balance between those aspects of the school environment that stressed self-discipline and responsibility and those requiring conformity. Many of the adolescents lacked adequate social skills for their age and preferred to associate with younger children. When behavioral or academic difficulties surfaced, a major family value was threatened, and parents generally responded by increasing their demands and reinforcing an already narrow family structure. Concurrently, the adolescent described a need for increased autonomy and flexibility. Conflicts escalated when the adolescents felt misunderstood and unsupported by their parents and the parents felt that they had failed to instill a sense of responsibility and self-discipline in their children. The family category membership highlighted the complementarity of the parent-child relationship and suggested a focus on the alteration of parental expectations. Because of their tendency to define the situation as requiring excessive control, parents required help to increase the flexibility of their expectations and standards to allow adolescents to assume personal responsibility for behavior and school performance. The mutual dependency of parents and adolescents required the creation of a different kind of proximity based on support and encouragement rather than dependency and cohesion. As parents discovered that a sense of achievement could be promoted with less vigilance, the transition to a more flexible family organization was relatively smooth. Recreation-Oriented Families This group of 5 families accounted for 8.6% of the sample. They are characterized by a strong emphasis on recreational activities, along with little emphasis on independence. In this case, the somewhat opaque category title is illuminated by the clinical picture. Observation of these families indicates that the parents were preoccupied with rearing young children and had experienced a transitional or critical event, such as a move or recent unemployment. They were socially isolated, 250 and the high recreation scores reflected their efforts to integrate their children and themselves into the community. The low emphasis on independence is understandable in the context of the family's focus on young children and relative isolation. Not surprisingly, the presenting problems for this group were minor and often required simple external solutions rather than more major therapeutic interventions. The parents' lack of an existing social network led them to request services for issues that might otherwise have been considered normal and handled within the boundaries of the extended family network. Therapeutic work involved clarification of the transitional nature of their problems and assistance in developing connections with neighbors and other members of the community. An important concern for the social worker was to refrain from pathologizing the family's process of adaptation to a transitional difficulty. Conflict-Oriented Families As one might expect, this category accounted for the largest proportion of the sample (32.7%). These 19 families were characterized by highly conflictual relationships and a correspondingly low emphasis on cohesion and independence. Levels of expressiveness and organization were also low, with a considerable emphasis on control. Noting a similar combination of high conflict, high control, and low organization in their sample, Moos and Moos (1976) identified a subgroup of their conflict cluster as structured conflict-oriented families. Billings and Moos (1982) identified 5.2% of their community sample as possessing similar characteristics. On a clinical basis, the families in this group all had seriously behaviorally disordered adolescents. Their conflicts were long-standing and ingrained in family relationships that were openly angry, competitive, and sometimes out of control. The intensity was so severe and the pattern so rigid and repetitive that most aspects of the parent-child relationship were affected. Parents and children found themselves in prolonged power struggles over seemingly trivial issues. Tension was continuously high, and the disputes often included other children who were pushed into taking strong positions in relation to their problematic sibling. Their positions served to maintain or intensify conflicts. Parents devoted much of their energy and attention to efforts to control and anticipate the adolescent's behavior. The adolescent resisted stubbornly and often responded by acting out. Siblings were angered by the resulting dissension and tended to blame him or her and increase their own level of provocation. The adolescent remained angry and spent less time at home. This withdrawal accentuated the parents' anxieties and reinforced the child's 251 isolation. This pattern was chronically repetitive and left all members of the family feeling angry and unsupported. The major treatment issue was the intense level of crisis at the point of referral, which was highlighted by the category membership. Typically, the conflict was so intense and entrenched that it was difficult to intervene without alienating either the adolescent or the parents. If the parents were alienated and left treatment, it was often interpreted by the teenager as another victory. If the adolescent refused to return to therapy and the parents had insufficient leverage to bring him or her back, the worker was left with the option of continuing exclusively with the parents, which, although often a viable alternative, generally resulted in a temporary increase in the adolescent's acting out. Initial treatment contacts focused on reducing the intensity of the conflict. The worker had to be sufficiently joined with both the adolescent and the parents to guarantee that directives were followed with minimal resistance. This objective was often accomplished by seeing the adolescent and parents separately as well as holding periodic meetings with other family members. Within this context, it was often effective to ask the adolescent to moderate his or her behavior. Typically, the adolescent responded to such a request in some small or symbolic way that allowed the parents, in turn, to modify their positions without feeling that their authority had been compromised. When all three understood the possibilities for change without losing face, the relationship began a slow course of improvement that eventually led to productive parent-child sessions. Control-Oriented Families Five families in this group accounted for 8.9% of the sample. They stressed the importance of both organization and control within the context of their seriously conflictual family relationships. There was little sense of family identity, and both expressiveness and independence were of minimal importance. This group's characteristics closely resembled those of the conflict- oriented category, differing primarily on the basis of their greater concern with issues of control rather than the impact of the conflicts. Their presenting problems generally involved moderate difficulties with an adolescent, together with a recent change in family structure. Of the 5 families, 3 were blended, and the remaining 2 had experienced recent divorces. The parents of these families in transition seemed intent on maintaining order and had a tendency to overreact to adolescent transgressions. An escalating sequence of control and challenge often resulted as the family searched for a more viable structure. 10252 Defining and highlighting the transitional nature of these families' problems was central to understanding them. Adolescent misbehavior was often a reaction to a temporary ambiguity in the family structure or a response to parental attempts to accelerate the adaptation process too rapidly. When the parents were successful at relaxing their efforts, changes in the child occurred relatively quickly. The main thrust of therapy was the normalization of events and the provision of educational input. Underorganized Families The striking feature of this group of 9 families (16% of the sample) was their lack of organization and structure as well as a general underfunctioning in most areas of family life. Not surprisingly, conflict tended to be high. Billings and Moos (1982) identified a similar, but much less extreme, category for 7.5% of their sample. It is important to note that the characteristics of these families differed somewhat from the conception of underorganized families presented by Aponte (1976), who described members of underorganized families as having considerable autonomy and independence. The families in this study scored low on independence, and members apparently received little support from one another. A consistent feature in all of these families was the chronic underfunctioning of a parent who had formerly been a central figure in the family's organization. The children's misbehavior was often a result of inconsistent rules and roles. The temporary or long-term nature of the parental incapacity was central to an understanding of the family treatment issues. In transitional situations, the issue was one of recovering the previously adequate structure. In chronic or long-term situations, it was important to evaluate the extent to which previous strengths could be enhanced within the context of a more balanced structure that depended less on a single member's competence and focused on the intensification of family interrelationships. DISCUSSION AND APPLICATIONS TO SOCIAL WORK PRACTICE Assessment can be viewed as the appraisal of a situation, based on both objective and subjective data. In the case of family assessment, objective data include information such as family composition and physical living situation. Subjective data reflect family members' perceptions, reactions, and feelings 11253 about people and events that make up part of their families' lives (Holman, 1983). Ideally, assessments lead to hypotheses that can be tested as part of the intervention process (Germain & Gitterman, 1980). The use of standardized family assessment instruments, such as the FES, may help social workers to systematize the collection and interpretation of subjective data. The classification system presented by Billings and Moos (1982) can be used to identify family groupings that appear to fit with clinical assessments. The application of this system with a social agency sample resulted in the classification of a large proportion of the families and yielded groupings that approximated those found in previous work with the instrument, while generating additional groupings that appeared to be specific to the context from which the sample was drawn. The methodology is simple to apply and can be easily incorporated into daily practice, thus creating the opportunity for developing a continuous picture of a worker's caseload or a group of caseloads. Whether generated through the FES or another instrument, the identification of patterns and characteristics in a given population may be useful for devising treatment strategies and making decisions about the nature of services. The use of such instruments is not meant to replace comprehensive assessments. Rather, it may be one means of sensitizing the practitioner to primary issues at an early stage. When this kind of methodology is applied across caseloads, it may become a common basis for communicating about practice and for identifying similarities and differences in workers' experiences. Findings from this study must be viewed with caution because of limitations related to methodology and instrumentation. Whether or not classifying families according to standard dimensions actually informs intervention has yet to be established. It is also not clear that interventions guided by such assessments are effective or more effective than intuitive conventional practice. The reliability and validity of the clinical impressions used to elaborate the description of family types have not been established. We were aware of the results of the classification process when we viewed the videotapes from which the clinical impressions were generated. Further research is needed to explore the relationship between independent clinical evaluations of families and their FES scores. It should also be noted that the clinical descriptions are based on a relatively small subsample. This material is intended to be illustrative. The validity of these generalizations needs to be verified, and they should not be used as a basis for decision making, although they may be useful at a more speculative level. The FES was selected for this study because of its broad approach to family functioning and the relatively favorable comments it has received in 12254 regard to instrument development, reliability, validity, and ease of administration (e.g., see Freedman & Sherman, 1987; Olson & Miller, 1984; Peterson & Cromwell, 1983; Walker & Crocker, 1988). Potential users, however, should be aware that the instrument has recently come under considerable criticism. There is disagreement about the utility of self-report instruments that arrive at a family-level score by averaging the responses of several family members. Some have argued that such data have no practical and reliable meaning, when they are used to describe family-level characteristics. Average scores assume that all family members' perceptions are equally valid and have the potential for minimizing extreme differences (Freedman & Sherman, 1987; Marcos & Draper, 1990; Ransom, Fisher, Phillips, Kokes, & Weiss, 1990). Others maintain that such scores do represent the family as a unit and may provide information that cannot be provided by other computations (Larsen & Olson, 1990; Moos, 1975). The reliability and validity of the FES have also been questioned. Roosa and Beals (1990) reexamined the internal consistency reliabilities of five of the FES subscales with a sample of 311 stressed and 74 control families. They found that the coefficients generated were lower than those originally reported and that most were below acceptable levels. In addition, they noted that the reliabilities varied with different types of families. Attempts to generate more reliable scales with the original items also failed. The face validity of the instrument was also questioned. A panel of psychology graduate students was asked to assign FES items to their original subscales. The panelists agreed with each other and the original scale on only 24 of the 45 items. Moos (1990) responded to this criticism with his own data and a discussion of the conceptual and empirical development of the FES. He maintained that the FES shows adequate and stable internal consistency reliability with diverse samples as well as good content and face validity. Moreover, he argued that the accumulated research utilizing the FES has supported the construct, concurrent, and predictive validity of the instrument. Given the uncertainty surrounding the FES, it should be used with caution. In fact, practitioners may well be advised to use one of the other standardized family assessment instruments. Nevertheless, this study does illustrate one method of integrating family assessment into social work practice. In the final analysis, family research is relevant to social work practice only when it is useful to those who interact with clients on a daily basis. 13255 APPENDIX Family Environment Scale Classification Rules a. Categories 3, 8, and 9 were created by the application of the hierarchical steps to the clinical population used in this study but did not appear in the community sample used by Billings and Moos (1982). 14256 REFERENCES Aponte, H.J. (1976). Underorganization in the poor family. In P. J. Guerin, Jr. (Ed.), Family therapy: Theory and practice (pp. 432-448). New York: Gardner. Beavers, W.R., Hampson, R.B., & Hulgus, V.F. (1985). The Beavers systems approach to family assessment . Family Process, 24, 398-405. Billings, A., & Moos, R.H. (1982). Family environments and adaptation: Aclinically applicable typology. American Journal of Family Therapy, 10, 26-38. Epstein, N., Baldwin, L., & Bishop, D. (1983). The McMaster family assessment device. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 9, 171-180. Freedman, N., & Sherman, R. (1987). Handbook for measurements for marriage and family therapy. New York: Brunner/Mazel . Fuhr, R.A., Moos, R.H., & Dishotsky, N. (1981). The use of family assessment and feedback on ongoing family therapy. American Journal of Family Therapy, 9, 24-36. Germain, C.B., & Gitterman, A. (1980). The life model of social work practice. New York: Columbia University Press. Holman, A.M. (1983). Family assessment: Toolsfor understanding and intervention. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Hudson, W.W. (1982). The Clinical Measurement Package: Afield manual . Chicago: Dorsey. Kolevzon, M.S., & Green, R.G. (1987). Family Awareness Scale. In K. Corcoran & J. Fischer (Eds.), Measures for clinical practice: A sourcebook (pp. 436-439). New York: Free Press. Larsen, A., & Olson, D.H. (1990). Capturing the complexity of family systems: Integrating family theory, family scores, and family analysis. In T. W. Draper & A. C. Marcos (Eds.), Family variables: Conceptualization, measurement, and use (pp. 19-47). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Marcos, A.C., & Draper, T.W. (1990). Capturing family variables. In T. W. Draper & A. C. Marcos (Eds.), Family variables: Conceptualization, measurement, and use (pp. 13-18). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Moos, R.H. (1975). Assessment and impact of social climate. In P. McReynolds (Ed.), Advances in psychological assessment (Vol. 3, pp. 8-41). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Moos, R.H. (1990). Conceptual and empirical approaches to developing family-based assessment procedures: The case of the Family Environment Scale . Family Process, 29, 199-208. Moos, R.H., & Moos, B.S. (1976). A typology of family social environments. Family Process, 15,357-371. Moos, R.H., & Moos, B.S. (1981). Family Environment Scale manual. Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press. Olson, D.H., McCubbin, H., Barnes, H., Larsen, A., Muxen, M., & Wilson, M. (1985). Family inventories (rev. ed.). St. Paul: University of Minnesota. Olson, D.H., & Miller, B.C. (1984). Introduction and overview. In D. H. Olson & B. C. Miller (Eds.), Family studies review yearbook (Vol. 2, pp. 17-30). Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Peterson, G.W., & Cromwell, R.E. (1983). Multisystem-multifaceted family assessment in clinical contexts. Family Process, 22, 147-164. Ransom, D.C., Fisher, L., Phillips, S., Kokes, R.F., & Weiss, R. (1990). The logic of measurement in family research. In T. W. Draper & A. C. Marcos (Eds.), Family variables: Conceptualization, measurement, and use (pp. 48-63). Newbury Park, CA: Sage Roosa, N.W., & Beals, J. (1990). Measurement issues in family assessment: The case of the Family Environment Scale. Family Process, 29, 191-198. 15257 Skinner, H., Santa-Barbara, J., & Steinhauer, P. (1983). The family assessment measure . 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Jacobs</surname></name> (Eds.), <source>Evaluating family programs</source> (pp. <fpage>177</fpage>-<lpage>194</lpage>). <publisher-loc>New York</publisher-loc>: <publisher-name>Aldine</publisher-name>.</citation></ref></ref-list></back></article></istex:document></istex:metadataXml><mods version="3.6"><titleInfo lang="en"><title>Integrating Family Assessment Into Social Work Practice</title></titleInfo><titleInfo type="alternative" lang="en" contentType="CDATA"><title>Integrating Family Assessment Into Social Work Practice</title></titleInfo><name type="personal"><namePart type="given">Diane</namePart><namePart type="family">Reichertz</namePart><affiliation>McGill University</affiliation><affiliation>McGill University</affiliation><role><roleTerm type="text">author</roleTerm></role></name><name type="personal"><namePart type="given">Harvy</namePart><namePart type="family">Frankel</namePart><affiliation>University of Manitoba</affiliation><affiliation>University of Manitoba</affiliation><role><roleTerm type="text">author</roleTerm></role></name><typeOfResource>text</typeOfResource><genre type="research-article" displayLabel="research-article"></genre><originInfo><publisher>Sage Publications</publisher><place><placeTerm type="text">Sage CA: Thousand Oaks, CA</placeTerm></place><dateIssued encoding="w3cdtf">1993-07</dateIssued><copyrightDate encoding="w3cdtf">1993</copyrightDate></originInfo><language><languageTerm type="code" authority="iso639-2b">eng</languageTerm><languageTerm type="code" authority="rfc3066">en</languageTerm></language><physicalDescription><internetMediaType>text/html</internetMediaType></physicalDescription><abstract lang="en">Despite the existence of a number of potentially useful instruments for assessing family functioning, most social workers rely on idiosyncratic indicators when assessing clients' families. This article demonstrates the applicability of a classification system for the Family Environment Scale (FES) that requires no computer skill or mathematical expertise. Data from a randomly selected sample of 58 client families were subjected to the classification system, which yielded five distinct groups and accounted for 83% of the sample. When combined with clinical observations, the descriptions of the groups can aid in planning interventions and organizing services.</abstract><relatedItem type="host"><titleInfo><title>Research on Social Work Practice</title></titleInfo><genre type="journal">journal</genre><identifier type="ISSN">1049-7315</identifier><identifier type="eISSN">1552-7581</identifier><identifier type="PublisherID">RSW</identifier><identifier type="PublisherID-hwp">sprsw</identifier><part><date>1993</date><detail type="volume"><caption>vol.</caption><number>3</number></detail><detail type="issue"><caption>no.</caption><number>3</number></detail><extent unit="pages"><start>243</start><end>257</end></extent></part></relatedItem><identifier type="istex">FDAD9B2C7EEA4C70857B0043F4C6BD7FE1F5780B</identifier><identifier type="DOI">10.1177/104973159300300301</identifier><identifier type="ArticleID">10.1177_104973159300300301</identifier><recordInfo><recordContentSource>SAGE</recordContentSource></recordInfo></mods></metadata><serie></serie></istex></record>Pour manipuler ce document sous Unix (Dilib)
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