Assessing Client Families: Assessment and Genogram Guide

The two parts are graded separately and they are not two formats for the same content, which is the misunderstanding that produces a weak submission. Part 1 is a comprehensive written assessment of a client *family*, running through sixteen named headings from demographics to treatment plan. Part 2 is a genogram extending back at least three generations — parents, grandparents and great-grandparents. The genogram is not an illustration of the assessment; it is a distinct analytic instrument that shows structure and pattern across time in a way prose cannot. If your genogram merely draws what the assessment already said in words, you have done Part 1 twice, and the marks allocated to the second part are for something you did not attempt. Plan the two parts together even though they are graded apart, because the assessment should gather the three generations of history the genogram needs, and discovering the gap after the interview means going back to the family for data you could have collected once.

Read the assessment headings as a family-level instruction rather than an individual one, because most of them will otherwise be answered about one person. This is a *client family*. Presenting problem means what brought the family in, which is often described differently by each member and the difference is itself data. Family psychiatric history is not a formality here but a central element, since patterns of illness across the system are what the genogram will make visible. Developmental history at family level means the family's own life cycle stage — a family launching adolescents faces different tasks from one with young children. Case formulation should explain how the members' difficulties relate to one another, not summarise each in turn. Say who the identified patient is and who decided that as well, since the member a family presents as the problem is frequently not the member whose difficulty is driving the system, and noticing the difference is a family-level observation.

The HIPAA instruction is embedded in the brief's own wording — *without violating HIPAA regulations* — and it applies with unusual force here. This is a real family from your practicum, and family assessments are dense with identifying detail: a distinctive occupation, an unusual number of siblings, a named town, a specific date of a death. Any one of those can identify a family even with names removed, and combinations of them almost certainly will. Use initials or invented first names, generalise occupations and locations, shift non-essential dates, and consider whether a detail is clinically necessary before including it. The same care extends to the genogram, where dates of birth and death are conventionally recorded and are precisely what makes a family findable. Say in the paper that details have been altered for confidentiality too, because a marker cannot otherwise distinguish deliberate de-identification from a vague history, and one of those is careful practice while the other looks like poor data gathering.

Build the genogram to the standard conventions rather than as a family tree, because the convention is what makes it readable to another clinician. Squares for men, circles for women, a cross or shading through the symbol for a death with the year alongside. Relationship lines carry meaning: marriage, separation, divorce, cohabitation each have their own notation, and the relational lines between individuals — close, conflictual, cut off, enmeshed — are where most of the clinical value sits. Record ages inside the symbols and note significant conditions: psychiatric diagnoses, substance use, chronic illness, suicide. Three generations is a floor rather than a target, and reaching it may require asking questions the family has not been asked before. Include a legend if you use any notation that is not universally standard, since genogram conventions vary slightly between sources and a symbol whose meaning is guessed at conveys nothing to the person reading it.

Then do the thing that separates a good submission from a complete one: interpret the genogram rather than presenting it. A genogram is drawn in order to be read, and what you are reading for is repetition. Does depression appear in three generations of one line? Do the men in this family leave, and at what age? Is there a pattern of cut-off after conflict, of caretaking falling to the eldest daughter, of losses clustering around a particular life stage? A paragraph naming two or three such patterns and connecting them to the presenting problem is worth more than a beautifully drawn diagram with no commentary, and it is what demonstrates that you understand why the assignment asked for three generations rather than one. Say what the patterns would change about your treatment plan as well, because an interpretation that stops at observation has described the family without doing anything with the description, and the plan is where the two parts finally join.

Two practical points from the brief itself. It notes that a sample has been attached which discusses only the Hernandez family, and that this assignment focuses on the Hernandez family — so check with your instructor if it is genuinely ambiguous whether you should use the video family or your own practicum family, because the two readings produce different papers and guessing wastes the work. Second, the transcript is attached in case the video is inaccessible, which means the genogram can be built from the transcript alone if needed. Review the specified Wheeler pages before drawing anything, since the assignment is testing whether you can apply that source rather than whether you can draw a diagram. Ask early if the ambiguity is real rather than working around it, since a note in the brief that reads as contradictory is exactly the sort of thing an instructor can settle in one sentence and a student can lose a weekend to.