The Family Task Interview: A Tool for Clinical Research in Family Interaction

Abstract

The Family Task Interview (FTI) is a multiple task interview administered by tape recorder and designed to elicit clinically relevant family interaction. The FTI has been designed to improve on previous similar instruments and a series of studies to evaluate its validity, reliability, and acceptability have been carried out. Further psychometric and practical evaluation is necessary, but results so far suggest that the FTI is a well standardized and easily administered instrument which is useful for research where assessment of family interaction using direct observation is required.

Assessing Change in Family Functioning as a Result of Treatment: The Structural Family Systems Rating Scale (Sfsr)

“…In order to conduct our investigations it was essential to develop a measure that was-as recommended by Kazdin (1986)-theoretically appropriate and clinically relevant for assessing the type of structural family change that we have identified as significant in our work, and that had psychometric properties adequate for use in research settings. Our work in this area has been consistent with the growing recognition of the need to assess the impact of family therapy on symptomatic change as well as on family functioning (Kinston & Loader, 1988;Lebow, 1981) as well as a growing recognition of the need for interactional based family process measures (Grotevant & Carlson, 1987;Rogers, Millar, & Bavelas, 1985). Thus, one of the products of the past 20 years of our efforts to interface theory, research, and application on structural family systems was the development of a measure of specific dimensions of structural family functioning.…”

Family interaction in adolescent school phobia

“…Studies Group and rated on a Family Health Scale (Kinston, Loader and Miller, 1987). This is a quantitative measure which uses a seven point scale to look at the extent of 'health' or 'pathology' in each section of the S.F.F.I.…”

“…None are currently being used in this country with clinically well-defined groups. The Family Studies Group at the Hospital for Sick Children, Great Ormond Street, London have, however, over the last decade developed a variety of tools to aid clinicians make systematic descriptions offamily interaction and have used them to describe families with a child with coeliac disease, obesity and psychiatric problems, as well as nonlabelled families (Kinston, Loader and Stratford, 1979;Loader et al, 198 1;Bingley, Loader and Kinston, 1984;Kinston and Loader, 1988;Kinston, Loader and Miller, 1987).…”

Preliminary psychometric evaluation of a standardized clinical family interview

“…Other workers in the field (Lewis et al, 1976;Minuchin et al, 1978), as well as ourselves (Kinston and Loader, 1986), have used an interview consisting of a series of tasks to elicit family interaction. Unlike the SCFI, such interviews are quite dissimilar to conventional clinical interviews.…”