Building resilience through PCIT: Assessing child adaptive functioning and parent-child relationship quality

In contrast to the traditional pathology model that guides most clinical practice and policy, an emergent body of literature alternatively emphasizes a strengths-based paradigm. Protective factors-especially adaptive caregiving relationships and psychosocial competence-significantly cause or moderate cumulative, long-term developmental consequences that spread across functional domains, levels, and systems (i.e., developmental cascades). Unfortunately, most child assessment measures and practices-including those used in PCIT-focus predominately if not exclusively on child pathology rather than child resiliency, competence, or protective contextual factors. Given the need for strength-based assessment tools and a more balanced understanding of children, this chapter presents three novel parent-report measures: (1) the Psychosocial Strengths Inventory for Children and Adolescents (PSICA; Niec et al., 2018), a multidimensional measure of child psychosocial competence; (2) the Child Relationship Development Questionnaire (CRDQ; Briegel, 2014); and (3) the Child Relationship Checklist (CRC; Briegel, 2014), which can be used independently or jointly to assess parent-child relationship quality. The CRDQ and the CRC together constitute the Child Relationship Behavior Inventory (CRBI). Each of these measures is appropriate for basic developmental research and early childhood interventions, but they are especially applicable to PCIT, which promotes the development of early child protective factors such as prosociality, secure attachment, compliance, affect regulation, and social awareness.