Assessing Service Needs of Kinship Families: The Modified Family Need Scale

Background and Purpose: Research indicates that many kinship families are in need of financial, emotional and intervention services (Linsk et al, 2009; Sakai, Lin, & Flores, 2011). Identifying their needs, however, is challenging due to kin caregivers’ diverse backgrounds and children’s various circumstances in out-of-home placement (Ynacura, 2013). Adding to these challenges is the lack of a reliable and validated instrument to assess the needs of kinship families. This paper explores one such potential tool, the Family Needs Scale (FNS; Dunst et al., 1988), and demonstrates how the FNS could be standardized for applications for kinship families. While the FNS was initially developed for parents of special needs children, we hypothesize that a modified FNS would be a good instrument for measuring kinship family needs.