Building family practice skills : methods, strategies, and tools / D. Mark Ragg.

Thinking family: Thinking family, theories and frameworks; Four parenting functions; Cultural influences on family functions -- Assessing families, an introduction: Exploration and data collection with families; Structuring the family exploration; Moving from assessment to treatment -- Building the working alliance: Preliminary engagement with family members; Interactive engagement with family members; Positioning families for change -- Change-focused intervention: Direct change strategies for influencing family action systems; Direct change strategies for influencing family processing systems; Influencing family members through indirect strategies of change -- Working with multiproblem and high-risk families: Challenges and promise; Multiagency work; Support-focused intervention.

This book presents a transtheoretical 'response system framework' for understanding family practice. This framework organizes theoretical information, assessment protocols, skills, and intervention strategies into a learning structure that helps students understand myriad client situations and the intervention strategies that would be most appropriate for those specific situations. Using this over-arching structure, and focusing on two systems of response--action systems (how family members behave and interrelate) and processing systems (how family members interpret/feel) - [the author] guides readers through the five parts of the book with the goal of building holistic family intervention skills.

Machine converted from AACR2 source record.