The Effective Use of Assessment Techniques in Counseling with Couples and Families

The field of family studies includes a range of research activities conducted by behavioral and social scientists from basic, applied, and interdisciplinary programs of studies. Regardless of theoretical orientation all such researchers must ultimately select or develop measurement procedures in order to operationalize key family constructs to investigate. Family assessment literature indicates a great diversity of instruments, but in reality family relationships maybe most clearly and parsimoniously differentiated along by two or three dimensions - a conclusion which has received considerable support from a range of theory and research in the domain of interpersonal relationships. Jabob and Windle (1999) suggested a three-factors structure of family dimensions for parallel assessment of marital and parent-child relations: marital interaction, mother-child interaction, and father-child interaction. In the study of families from a systems perspective, the unit of analysis and the assessment context should not be confused. As unit of analysis we can study an individual, a dyad or a whole family but the assessment context is determined by the collection of individuals present for the assessment. Several studies have showed that data drawn from different contexts produce different results but few studies have used observational methods, most rely on self-report measures from a single source. This study attempt to address the need to find a composite measure that combines dyadic and triadic assessments of family processes, and to move from observing dyads to observing interactions when the whole family is present. Although there is widespread agreement about the importance of studying the family as a whole, most current research focus on the different dyads in the family, probably because family-system models are too complex to be tested adequately using systematic empirical methods. The assumption underlying this study is that the effectiveness of therapeutic interventions for assisting couples and families can be enhanced by the use of timely, accurate clinical planning made possible by the easy availability of pinpointed descriptive material derived from psychological testing results, providing the testing outcomes are integrated into a family system framework. (Nurse, 1999).