Application of the social relations model to family assessment.

A family assessment serves two primary purposes: the guidance of clinical interventions and the evaluation of clinical outcomes. To support these activities, a family assessment should provide a level of descriptive detail with respect to family functioning that is commensurate with a family systems perspective. Unfortunately, most widely used self-report family assessment instruments do not provide that level of detail. This article presents a descriptive approach to family assessment that is based on the application of the social relations model (SRM; D. A. Kenny & L. La Voie, 1984) to round-robin family data. In contrast to previous presentations of the SRM, this article outlines the procedure for assessing a single family, thus translating SRM analysis from a basic research tool into an applied, clinical assessment tool.