Family Assessment

A family assessment is a method of collecting and organizing information about a family’s structure and function. As a nurse, you’ll perform family assessments and initiate interventions to promote positive health outcomes and support the family’s well-being.

A family can be defined as a group of people that depend on each other for physical, emotional, or economic support. They’re also bound together in relationships, either by blood, marriage, adoption, or by choice.

Now, individual families can be better understood by considering their structure and function. Family structure refers to the family’s organization, which includes the individuals who make up the family, their relationships with each other, and how they interact with each other and other social systems.

A family’s internal structure includes the individual members within the family. For example, a family may consist of a married couple, which may or may not have children or stepchildren; or, a family can be a multi-adult household, which could include a cohabiting couple and multiple generations of family members who share a home.

Families also have an external structure, which refers to extended family members who are considered outside of the immediate family, like aunts, uncles, and cousins. The external structure also includes the family’s associations with their community, like with work, school, churches, and other institutions. Lastly, families have contextual structures which refer to their ethnicity, race, social class, and religion.

Next, family function refers to the family’s activities that meet the needs of individual family members, the family as a whole, and family’s relationship with the community.

There are five primary functions the family performs. First, there’s the economic function, which includes how the family makes decisions about managing expenses, such as housing, insurance, savings, and buying other goods and services for the family.

Next is the reproductive function, or the ability to raise children within the family and community. There’s also a socialization function, in which families teach children how to fit into society and carry-on cultural traditions.

Then, there’s the affective function, meaning how members create a sense of belonging and develop caring relationships. Lastly, there’s the health care function, where family members engage in health promotion, illness prevention, and care for ill family members.

Family functions can also be categorized as instrumental or expressive. Instrumental functioning describes activities of daily living, such as cooking, eating, taking medications, hygiene, and sleeping.

Expressive functioning includes how the family communicates with one another, including both verbal and non-verbal communication; and how the family solves problems. Additionally, it includes the roles of each family member, how members influence each other, common beliefs they hold, and alliances formed between family members.

Now, as the nurse, your primary goals are to gather information about the family structure and functions, and initiate interventions and services to promote positive health outcomes and support the family’s well-being.