McMaster Family Assessment

McMaster family assessment is a theory-driven approach to evaluating how a family functions, organized around the McMaster Model of Family Functioning and operationalized in the widely used Family Assessment Device. Developed by Nathan Epstein, Duane Bishop, and colleagues at McMaster University, it assesses families on six dimensions — problem solving, communication, roles, affective responsiveness, affective involvement, and behavior control — plus an overall general-functioning scale, each scored from family-member self-report against clinical cutoffs that distinguish healthy from unhealthy functioning.