Family Environment Scale

The Family Environment Scale (FES; published by Mind Garden, http://www.mindgarden.com) is composed of 10 subscales that measure the actual, preferred, and expected social environments of all types of families. The 10 subscales assess three sets of dimensions: (a) relationship dimensions (cohesion, expressiveness, conflict); (b) personal growth or goal orientation dimensions (independence, achievement orientation, intellectual-cultural orientation, active-recreational orientation, moral-religious emphasis); and (c) system maintenance dimensions (organization, control). The relationship and system maintenance dimensions primarily reflect internal family functioning; the personal growth or goal orientation dimensions primarily reflect the linkages between the family and the larger social context.

The FES has three forms:

• 1.
  The Real Form (Form R) measures people's perceptions of their current family or their family of origin. This form is used to assess individuals' perceptions of their conjugal and nuclear families, formulate clinical case descriptions, monitor and promote improvement in families, focus on how families adapt to life transitions and crises, understand the impact of the family on children and adolescents, and predict and measure the outcome of treatment.
• 2.
  The Ideal Form (Form I) measures people's preferences about an ideal family environment. This form is used to measure family members' preferences about how a family should function; assess family members' value orientations and how they change over time, such as before and after family counseling; and identify areas in which people want to change their family.
• 3.
  The Expectations Form (Form E) measures people's expectations about family settings. This form is used in premarital counseling to clarify prospective partners' expectations of their family, help members of blended families describe how they expect their new family to function, and identify parents' expectations about their family after a major life transition, such as retirement or the youngest child's leaving home.

The FES manual presents normative data on 1,432 normal families and 788 distressed families, describes the derivation and application of a family incongruence score that assesses the extent of disagreement among family members, presents psychometric information on the reliability and stability of the subscales, and covers the research applications and validity of the subscales. The manual includes a conceptual model of the determinants and outcomes of the family environment and reviews studies focusing on families of youth with behavioral, emotional, or developmental [Page 353]disabilities; families with a physically ill child; families with a history of physical or sexual abuse; and families of patients with medical and psychiatric disorders. The FES has also been used to focus on the relationship between the family environment and child development and adult adaptation and on families coping with life transitions and crises, such as parent or child death, unemployment and economic deprivation, immigration and acculturation, and combat and war.