Assessing family relationships through drawing: the Family Life Space.

The Family Life Space (FLS) is a graphic instrument that may aid the relational assessment of families. This interactive instrument involves all members of the family in a joint task, that of collectively making a drawing of their own family system and it allows the gathering of information related to the overall family organization. The FLS was originally conceived by Danuta Mostwin in the early 70s and used as an instrument for clinical intervention.

The Clinical Generational Interview. An instrument for family assessment.

Interviews are the privileged tool for carrying out qualitative research and clinical assessments on family relationships. Nevertheless, there are limited examples of interviews in clinical and psychosocial literature that are explicitly aimed at the evaluation of relational-family constructs. This paper presents the essential characteristics of the Clinical Generational Interview (CGI): an original tool for investigating and evaluating family relationships, that aims to combine the complexity of the subject being studied with the systematic and rigorous approach.

The Conjoint Family Drawing: A Tool to Explore About Family Relationships.

In this article we will present the Conjoint Family Drawing, a graphic-interactive tool developed to evaluate family relationships. This tool allows an analytical and clinical evaluation of families and their relationships while facilitating the understanding of the overall family functioning through a synthetic coding system which distinguishes families from each other. First of all, a presentation of the analytical coding system is provided; such system consists of a grid, formed by two distinct levels of observation: the analysis of the product, which, in turn focuses on two levels, the global-familiar one (given by the overall drawing) and the individual one (given the individual members' drawings), and the analysis of the drawing process (what happens during the realization of the drawing), which is made up of the observations of family interactions at the individual and group level.

Intimate Partner Violence and Child Custody Evaluation: A Model for Preliminary Clinical Intervention.

Intimate partner violence is defined by the World Health Organization as "any behavior within an intimate relationship that causes physical, psychological, or sexual harm to those in the relationship" and it refers to a specific relationship dynamic. In recent decades, an increasing number of studies have focused on this phenomenon, considering its exponential growth over time. Many studies have focused on risk factors for violence within the couple relationship.

Muslim Immigrant Men's and Women's Attitudes Towards Intimate Partner Violence.

This study aims to study the attitudes towards Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) in a group of Muslim immigrants. To this end, six focus-groups were conducted involving 42 first-generation Muslim immigrants (21 males and 21 females) from Pakistan, Egypt and Morocco. Focus groups transcripts were then analyzed using the software ATLAS.

Till the ocean do us part: Italian and American therapists' representations of stepfamilies in treatment.

Research often focuses on the characteristics of stepfamilies and their differences with first-union families; however, few studies take into account the therapist's perspective with regards to the treatment of such families. Also, cross-cultural research on the topic is limited. To fill these gaps, a content analysis of responses from 125 Italian and 45 American therapists regarding their representations of stepfamilies and stepfamily therapy was undertaken.