Developing a Spiritual Assessment Toolbox: A Discussion of the Strengths and Limitations of Five Different Assessment Methods

Increasingly, social workers are being called on to conduct spiritual assessments, yet few assessment methods have appeared in academic literature. This article reviews five complementary assessment approaches that have recently been developed to highlight different facets of clients' spiritual lives. Specifically, one verbal model, spiritual histories, is discussed, along with four diagrammatic approaches: spiritual lifemaps, spiritual genograms, spiritual ecomaps, and spiritual ecograms. An overview of each approach is provided along with a discussion of its relative strengths and limitations. The aim here is to familiarize readers with a repertoire of spiritual assessment tools so that the most appropriate assessment method in a given client-practitioner setting can be selected.