Continuous family assessment: How are you going? How are you going now?

Abstract

Working with children and families experiencing child maltreatment requires that a practitioner understand the family: their risks, their needs, their strengths, and the goals of the intervention. Therefore, many of the tools and training topics that support this work focus on family and child assessment. The purposes of a thorough assessment are to understand the immediate circumstances so that children are protected, and interventions are relevant to the child and family's circumstances and events. This paper presents a new assessment tool that is ecologically oriented, empirically based, and able to provide a continuous assessment of the child and family that can chart improvements and declines over the life of a case.