A Comprehensive Framework for Conducting Client Assessments: Highlighting Strengths, Environmental Factors and Hope

Consultants are often asked to conduct comprehensive assessments of clients, which must be conducted in a way that affords the most complete and accurate data to inform the ensuing recommendations. Appropriate and effective assessments require comprehensive examination of both the individual and the setting. Attending to strengths and weaknesses within clients and the client’s environment allows for a more complete understanding of a client’s situation. Specifically, professionals must attend to four aspects of a client: (a) the client’s psychological and behavioral strengths, (b) the client’s psychological and behavioral weaknesses, (c) the strengths in the client’s environment and (d) the weaknesses in the client’s environment (Wright, 1991). In addition, this approach can be enhanced by using hope theory (Snyder, 1994) as a framework for understanding client goals, along with the routes to those goals (pathways thinking) and the motivation to use those pathways (agency thinking). Finally, the advantages of using this innovative assessment approach to inform the recommendations and professional interactions are considered.