Assessment of Families

Purpose of Family Assessment

Scholars and practitioners from an array of disciplines (e.g., family studies, psychology, sociology, public health) are interested in family relationships, most typically as predictors of specific well-being outcomes such as individual development and health status. This interest has stemmed from the belief that family dynamics and relationships are fundamental correlates or predictors of individuals' cognitions, emotions, and behavior in close relationships and role settings.

Scholars' disciplinary orientation and research interests shape how family assessment is conceptualized and designed. For example, family studies [Page 121]scholars have focused on the connections between subsystems or dyads within the family, such as marriage (or cohabitating) relationships and parenting. From this perspective, family is examined as a set of potentially interconnected dyads. Family studies scholars who have included an assessment of the whole family often have tried to sort out predominant influences. Do families as a whole matter or does dyadic functioning take priority as an influence of individual well-being? Do whole family system properties, such as cohesion, add any additional understanding to assessments of parent–child relationships, such as attachment, or assessments of marital relationships, such as intimacy?

Most scholars generally have approached the issue of family assessment in two different ways. Some disciplines, such as developmental psychology, have favored focusing on parent–child relationships as central correlates of child and adolescent development. Often properties of the parent–child relationship have been viewed as more central because they are thought to be more proximal to developmental outcomes than are whole family system properties. Recent theorizing has shifted a bit in this area with some scholars testing process models that suggest that certain family characteristics, such as cohesion or disengagement, moderate the relationships between parent–child properties and individual outcomes. Within this paradigm, family becomes one of the contexts for the effects of socialization influences on individual well-being.

Scholars in disciplines with a health and medical focus often have focused on the family system as a whole. They typically have tested and implemented practice models that suggest that family properties shape individual health outcomes, such as children's asthmatic symptoms, adolescents' use of condoms, and parents' cardiovascular health. Within this paradigm, scholars most often have conceptualized the family system as a holistic constellation of relationships and have assessed general family functioning or specific aspects of family process and structure such as openness and quality of communication among family members.

Although an extensive listing of family constructs assessed in the research literature is beyond the scope of this entry, a core of salient family constructs is feasible. Frequently studied family constructs have included adaptability, affective expression, behavioral control, boundaries, boundary ambiguity, coalitions, cohesion, communication, conflict, coping, differentiation, disengagement, enmeshment, fusion, individuation, intimacy, and family stress.

Level of Assessment

There are four common levels of family assessment: families as a whole, triads, dyads, and individual family members. One controversial issue is whether the level of assessment must match the level of conceptualization. For example, when scholars study a child's involvement in parents' marital conflict, which is by definition a triadic construct, must the researchers collect information from all three family members? Although there has been little consensus regarding the issue of matching between the level of conceptualization and level of assessment, two conclusions have received a great deal of support. First, the conceptual definition of the construct must be explicit and must delineate the ways in which cognitions, emotions, and behaviors constitute the essential elements of the construct. This definition and delineation informs assessment decisions and affects the degree to which matching is necessary. Second, scholars must demonstrate a clear understanding of systematic biases that may occur when implementing specific assessment decisions and must design research in ways that minimize the chance that these biases affect the interpretations of the findings. For example, it is plausible that parents' depressive affect negatively skews their reports of children's behavior problems and that adolescents' attachment security increases their perceptions of positive parenting behaviors. In the context of these examples, without adequate consideration within the design and analysis, interpretations of results that derive from parents' reports of children's problem behaviors and adolescents' reports of parenting might be suspect because of the contaminating influence of parents' depressive symptoms or adolescents' attachment insecurities. In general, systematic biases can stem from the influence of related constructs, as illustrated in the above example, from family members' personality traits, from differences in developmental and relational expectations among family members, and from the implementation of specific data collection [Page 122]methods, as in reactivity concerns that are present in observational methods.

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