Assessing parental capacity to change is an important part of social work assessments of children and families.
There has been limited development of practice methodologies for assessing capacity to change.
The authors present a two-part approach to assessing capacity to change.
One part of the approach is the assessment of barriers to and facilitators of change.
The other part draws on goal attainment scaling to test parents’ abilities to change (Harnett, 2007).
Applying both parts ensures an opportunity to change is combined with an understanding of the potential for change.