L'assessment in psicoterapia sistemica: metodi di valutazione qualitativa e quantitativa delle dinamiche familiari.

When we talk about assessment in psychotherapy we run into a methodological issue connected to the need of objectiveness in clinical and experimental research, which are both supposed to develop as evidence based disciplines, this leading to the risk of undervalue the subjective aspects that arise from the psychotherapy practice. Assessment in psychotherapy is also the starting point for the expression of a diagnosis, of a psychotherapeutic plan, as well as evaluating the treatment efficacy by using assessment instruments suited to the complexity of the observed phenomena. The tools and methods of assessment of familial systems in systemic psychotherapy are still not as well-known as instruments for individual assessment; the most common psychometric test are quite calibrated to individual evaluation, rather than relational dynamics evaluation. The purpose of the current work is to highlight that some assessment tools, by evaluating some “relational parameters” connected to family interplay, can help systemic psychotherapist to shape his therapeutic work. These instruments, besides providing a multidimensional approach to the assessment of families, allow us to make both quantitative and qualitative evaluation of more variables, in order to speculate about family functioning. Particularly we want to present five evaluation instrument that we experimented during our clinical research: The Family Drawing Test, the Wyltwick Family Tasks (corrected version), the Family Relation Test, the Family Life Space of Mostwin (corrected version) and finally the Family Adabtability and Cohesion Evaluation Scale o FACES III. Every instruments make possible to carry out both a quantitative and qualitative evaluation of relational parameters, making them useful either in clinical practice or in research as well as individual instruments of assessment, giving strong help both to diagnostic phase and to treatment efficacy evaluation phase.