ABSTRACT
In recent years, there has been an upsurge in the development of family assessment measures (Carlson & Grotevant, 1988) designed to assist clinicians and researchers in operationalizing complex family processes. Family therapists seem somewhat reluctant to utilize these instruments in the context of their clinical practices. Family therapists may view the use of such instruments as an attempt to take the richness and fluidity of family process and to reduce it into scores, or they may believe that structured measurement procedures are linear expressions of a system's circular process (Floyd, Weinand, & Cimmarusti, 1989).
