Equitable Child and Family Assessments: The Role of Social Work Education

Overview: This presentation discusses the need for developing practice tools relating to assessment skills and competencies, within specific contexts, and goes beyond the basic approaches traditionally taught through the generalist/eclectic problem solving model. Additionally, this presentation describes the development of a practice tool to be utilized by clinicians when administering assessments.Proposal text:

Background/Purpose: An often-utilized approach in social work practice education, is the introduction of students to the generalist/eclectic problem-solving model (Perlman, 1970). Through this model, students are exposed to the importance of the assessment phase in the client/therapist relationship in identifying client challenges. Furthermore, assessments are often used by state and federal policymakers as benchmarks for service eligibility. For this project, university research staff partnered with the State’s mental health authority as part of the third-party review contract. Numerous clinicians with various educational backgrounds and levels of practice experience completed the CAFAS or PECFAS (Hodges & Wong, 1996) with children and families experiencing mental health concerns and university research staff observed the clinical interview. Results from the observations revealed variance as it pertains to CAFAS/PECFAS delivery. As such, this presentation’s objective is to describe how the research team compiled information from completed interviews and developed a practice guide that can be used by clinicians.

Methods: Researchers partnered with the State’s mental health authority, as well as twenty-three community mental health centers throughout one mid-western state. From a list of scheduled intake appointments, researchers randomly selected assessments to observe. Community mental health center clinicians conducted the eligibility appointment as normal but with researchers observing. Throughout the appointment, researchers took structured notes regarding the delivery of the CAFAS/PECFAS to families. There were 230 total case observations. After completing case observations, a guide was developed based on results from the observations.

Results: Through the observation of eligibility appointments, researchers found variability in how clinicians from mental health centers across the state administer the CAFAS to children and families seeking specialty mental health care. As such, research staff developed a guide to provide clinicians with easy-to-access recommendations for common challenges in CAFAS/PECFAS assessment. The first section of the guide summarizes challenges in overall CAFAS administration, and the second section reviews challenges within each domain of the assessment tools. Both sections include recommended assessment practices for addressing each challenge identified. Finally, the guide includes information pertaining to the delivery of assessments from a diversity, equity, and inclusion lens, as to ensure equity in mental health care service eligibility determination.

Conclusions & Implications: An often-used model for social work practice class, is the generalist/eclectic problem-solving model. Through this model, social work students are introduced to general assessment practices. However, more nuanced approaches to incorporating assessment is needed in social work practice classes. Specifically, this study’s findings indicate that despite general training and education on assessment, more specific guides and tools are needed, to assist social workers in delivering high quality and equitable assessments to children and families. Practitioners and researchers can use the guide developed as a result of this study to further develop practice tools that can be introduced in graduate social work courses so students are well equipped to deliver standardized assessments and meet CSWE’s educational and policy accreditation standards (2015). Additionally, these refinements in assessment may also contribute to the promotion of equity and inclusion in social work practice.