"Family NASA:" Prototype of an Assessment Tool for Social Work with Families

(Kevin Acers, 2006)

NOTE: This page provides some explanation of a Social Work assessment tool I have developed. To see a prototype of the tool itself, click here. Even though the tool is fairly self-explanatory, I do recommend you read these notes before using or adapting it (or, for that matter, before rejecting it!).

During my final semester of graduate school in Social Work, I completed a practicum at a community mental health center. One of the agency activities I participated in was counseling students in an alternative school. This school was established by a local public school district to provide an alternative location for educational services to students with IEPs (Individualized Education Programs for Special Education services) whose removal from their regular schools is precipitated by serious behavior problems. Specifically, students are referred to the alternative school upon violating school rules (and criminal law) related to drugs, weapons, and/or assault. The school district provides certified classroom teachers and academic materials. The mental health agency provides staff who focus on promoting positive behavioral change through relationship-building, group activities, and counseling services.

As a practicum student, I engaged in on-going dialogue with agency staff regarding possible directions for enhancing the services to more effectively meet the students' needs. Several observations came to light in this process.

• While research and common sense underscore the importance of parental involvement in student success (social success, academic success, and personal success), and enhancing student success is one of the basic goals of the alternative school, parental contact with the school is generally minimal.
  

• Many of the students, through their time in the alternative school environment, do appear to make progress towards success. However, there is little follow up once the students leave the school (generally, a student spends about 9 weeks in the alternative school before being re-admitted to the school of origin). 
  

• From a systems perspective, if intervention is limited to the school setting, ignoring conditions in the student's home, neighborhood, and school of origin,  a student's gains may not be easily sustainable or generalized to other spheres of the student's life. Some of the barriers to a student's success may not be limited to his/her own behaviors or attitudes--they may be imbedded in home or community circumstances that undermine any positive changes the student makes individually within the alternative school setting. By the same token, important resources that could help bolster a student's chances for success may lie outside the individual student as well (within the family system, community, etc.).

These and other observations led me to develop a family-oriented assessment tool, the Family Needs and Strengths Assessment or "Family NASA." It is a particular format of fairly standard areas of interest in family assessment (finances, education/training, employment, transportation, health, housing, social support, child care, food and nutrition, and family relationships). One key component of the tool's format is its inclusion of a needs-to-strengths continuum for self-reporting. The idea is not to presuppose either a strength or a deficit, but to leave it open to the responder's perception of how the family is doing in each area. While there are numerical ratings associated with each assessment area, the instrument is not intended to be used for establishing a baseline or measuring outcomes. There is no interpretation matrix for either a total "score" or for the ratings of individual items. The intended purpose is  to facilitate communication and offer services that could benefit the family system.

As such, a solutions-focused conversation can emerge from the respondent's ranking of each assessment area, whether it is an identified area of strength ("How have you managed to sustain this? How will you be tapping into it in the coming months to help your child get back on track?") or an area of need ("What have you been doing effectively that has you at a 'minus 2' and not a 'minus 4 or 5'? What will help you get it, say, to a 'minus 1'? Would you like to brainstorm a little about how to do that?").

In the context of the alternative school, the idea is for the Family NASA to be incorporated into the already existing intake procedures. When the school district refers a student to the alternative school, the student, accompanied by a parent, must complete an intake packet with the assistance of clinical services staff from the mental health agency.  The intake packet includes the types of forms typical of agencies billing Medicaid for  reimbursement--psychsocial history, confidentiality policy, description of the presenting problem, etc.--and will be supplemented by a CAR complete with DSM diagnosis. This will serve as the basis for development of an treatment plan for the mental health services the student will receive while enrolled at the school.

 The idea is to expand this intake process so that the conversation shifts from the student's behavioral issues to the family context. The intake worker communicates to the parent  that  no child can be well-served if the family is ignored. Done artfully, this conversation can serve a vital purpose: to engage the parent as part of the client-system. Ideally, the message the parent gets is that the staff at the school are not there to "fix the kid," but rather to help make things easier for the student to succeed, in part by making things easier for the family. 

If a household is facing stress related to finances or other issues, partnering with the parent to address this is in the best interest of the student. By reducing stress and chaos in the home environment to which the student returns each day, the likelihood for effective interventions at school increases. 

At the same time, recognizing the family strengths as the parent perceives them can help guide the clinician to partner with the parent to tap into those strengths and build on them in working with the student at school. This bolstering of the parent's awareness of their own resources helps foster a sense that the school respects the parents and appreciates their assets. In both cases--where needs or strengths are indicated--the conversation provides an opportunity for relationship-building between the parents and the school, for providing additional services or referrals to the parents, and for identifying available resources which can help the school and the parents work more effectively with the student.

This brings an element of case management, or at least brokering, into the activities of the school personnel. One feature of the Family NASA is that the parents indicate (by a check-mark) each area where they are ready to seek ideas or assistance. This feature can facilitate more in-depth conversation with the parent about the identified area of strength or need. The intake worker can invite the parent to schedule an appointment to explore these issues in more depth and collaborate on solutions. This might be brief and informal--as simple as identifying possible resources in the community and giving referrals--or it could develop into a case maangement framework for on-going work with the parent, a partnership to help the parent better meet the family needs, a relationship that ideally would provide for enhanced support of the efforts to work with the student individually at school. 

Information from the Family NASA could also be integrated into individual counseling sessions with the student, if clinically appropriate, as well as follow-up contacts with the student and his/her family following discharge from the school. If the parent has indicated a need for assistance in improving family relationships, the agency can offer  family therapy or parenting classes to augment the school-based work with the student.

Finally, the perceptions of various parents as reflected in their ratings on the Family NASA might, in an aggregate sense, unveil to the school staff (teachers as well as mental health professionals) an overall portrait of the strengths and needs of the school community as a whole--insight which could help inform a variety of decisions about program development and intervention strategies.

The Family NASA prototype is on this website for free use or adaptation. (Copy and paste it into a text document, then print. You may need to slightly alter the formatting in order to fit it on two sides of one 8 1/2" x 11" sheet of paper, as intended). Please note that as a prototype, this instrument has not been formally evaluated in terms of validity or reliability. Contact me if you are interested in conducting such an evaluation. 

You may use it as is, or if you are interested in adapting it, feel free to make any changes which make sense to you in terms of  assessment areas and/or format. (For example, an additional area might be related to faith/spiritual support). My only request is that you email me with your intentions and with any feedback/results, and do not make any use of the Family NASA instrument which in any way compromises standards of professional ethics.