Clinical Family Assessment: Applying Structured Measurement Procedures in Treatment Settings*

This article describes the use of a battery of structured family measurement procedures to conduct systematic, comprehensive assessments of families who enter treatment. The measures are derived from family research and include self-report questionnaires and structured observation of family interactions. The assessment is multimodal, and examines the entire family unit, the marital subsystem, the individual family members, and the larger social context affecting a family. Two case examples are presented which demonstrate how the structured assessment data are combined with clinical theory and other information about a family to generate initial hypotheses about the functioning of the family system and likely avenues for therapeutic intervention.