Family Empowerment Scale (FES)

Abstract

The Family Empowerment Scale (FES) is a seminal, 34-item psychometric rating scale designed to quantify empowerment among parents and primary caregivers of children with emotional, behavioral, developmental, or physical disabilities. Developed in 1992 by Paul E. Koren, Neal DeChillo, and Barbara J. Friesen at the Research and Training Center on Family Support and Children’s Mental Health at Portland State University, the FES addresses an essential gap in pediatric behavioral health and social work by moving beyond deficit-oriented clinical metrics toward a strengths-based assessment of family capacity. The instrument is grounded in a two-dimensional conceptual framework that cross-references three distinct levels of empowerment—(1) Family (personal mastery and management of immediate domestic needs), (2) Service System (collaborative engagement, navigation, and advocacy within education, mental health, and healthcare delivery networks), and (3) Community/Political (broader advocacy, legislative involvement, and mutual aid)—against three expressions of empowerment: knowledge, competence, and action. Caregivers respond to statements using a five-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (Not True at all) to 5 (Very True). Across decades of empirical replication, the FES has demonstrated robust psychometric integrity, exhibiting high internal consistency reliability (Cronbach’s alpha coefficients typically ranging from .87 to .88 across subscales and exceeding .90 for total empowerment), strong test-retest stability (coefficients between .77 and .85), and well-established construct, convergent, discriminant, and factorial validity. The instrument is widely utilized in clinical assessment, family-centered service evaluations, child welfare research, and longitudinal monitoring of caregiver outcomes across diverse pediatric populations.

Keywords

Family Empowerment Scale, parental empowerment, psychometrics, caregiver advocacy, child mental health, family-centered care, developmental disabilities, special education advocacy, self-efficacy, psychological empowerment

Authors

The Family Empowerment Scale was conceptualized, operationalized, and psychometrically validated by a multidisciplinary team of researchers at the Research and Training Center on Family Support and Children’s Mental Health, situated within the Regional Research Institute for Human Services at Portland State University, Portland, Oregon, United States:

• Paul E. Koren, Ph.D. — Research Associate and Psychometrician at the Regional Research Institute for Human Services, Portland State University. Dr. Koren’s scholarship focuses on quantitative research methodology, program evaluation, scale development, and family involvement in human service delivery systems.
• Neal DeChillo, Ph.D., MSW — Professor Emeritus and former Associate Dean of the School of Social Work at Portland State University. Dr. DeChillo has published extensively on collaboration between human service professionals and family members, psychiatric rehabilitation, and social work administration.
• Barbara J. Friesen, Ph.D. — Professor Emeritus and former Director of the Research and Training Center on Family Support and Children’s Mental Health at Portland State University. Dr. Friesen is internationally recognized as a pioneer in family-centered systems of care, parent-professional partnerships, and advocacy-driven mental health policy for children, youth, and families.

Purpose

The primary clinical and empirical purpose of the Family Empowerment Scale is to systematically assess the multidimensional construct of empowerment as experienced and reported by parents and caregivers raising children with special healthcare needs, neurodevelopmental conditions, or emotional and behavioral challenges. Prior to the development of the FES, assessment paradigms within child psychopathology and social services were largely dominated by pathological and deficit-oriented frameworks. Conventional assessment batteries routinely focused on maternal guilt, parental distress, pathological family dynamics, dysfunctional parenting styles, and systemic breakdown. Consequently, service providers lacked standardized instruments capable of measuring parental competence, self-advocacy, systemic literacy, and collaborative agency.

The FES was purposefully engineered to fill this methodological void by offering a validated, strengths-based instrument capable of serving multiple functions across research and clinical domains:

• Clinical Assessment and Individualized Goal Setting: Clinicians, social workers, case managers, and pediatric psychologists utilize the FES to assess a caregiver’s baseline perception of agency across family, service system, and community environments. Identifying discrepancies between domains (e.g., a parent who feels highly efficacious in managing daily behavioral crises at home but feels completely disempowered during Individualized Education Program meetings) enables clinicians to tailor psychoeducational and advocacy interventions directly to the family’s felt needs.
• Program Evaluation and Service System Monitoring: The instrument functions as an outcome indicator for family-centered initiatives, respite care services, parent-to-parent peer support programs, and wrap-around mental health interventions. By administering the FES pre- and post-intervention, agencies evaluate whether systemic changes translate into measurable increases in parental agency, systemic navigation, and community-level participation.
• Etiological and Longitudinal Research: In developmental psychopathology, public health, and child welfare research, the FES serves as a standardized independent, mediating, or dependent variable. Researchers examine how caregiver empowerment moderates the relationship between child symptom severity and parental stress, or how empowerment directly influences treatment adherence, service utilization, and child developmental trajectories.
• Policy Advocacy and Systems Reform: By aggregating FES scores across community cohorts, parent advocacy coalitions and policymakers quantify the extent to which public systems (such as special education, juvenile justice, and child welfare) facilitate or inhibit parent involvement, providing empirical justification for legislative funding and administrative reform.

Psychological Construct

The construct assessed by the Family Empowerment Scale is psychological empowerment contextualized within the ecological realities of caregiving. Rather than viewing empowerment as a static, unidimensional personality trait or a generalized locus of control, Koren, DeChillo, and Friesen conceptualized empowerment as a dynamic, transactional, and multidimensional construct reflecting a caregiver’s ability to exert control over their life and actively influence the organizational systems and environments that impact their child.

The conceptual framework of the FES is organized around a 3 × 3 matrix that intersects two primary axes: the Level of Empowerment (the systemic context where empowerment is manifest) and the Expression of Empowerment (the psychological modality through which empowerment is exhibited).

The Three Levels of Empowerment

The 34 items of the FES are formally organized into three empirically validated subscales representing ecological levels:

• Family Level (12 items): Assesses the caregiver’s perceived competence, confidence, and self-efficacy regarding the management of everyday challenges and parenting responsibilities directly within the household. It encompasses the caregiver’s belief in their ability to parent effectively, de-escalate crises, foster the child’s positive development, seek informal social support, and maintain an emotionally stable family atmosphere. Exemplar items include Item 4 (“I feel confident in my ability to help my child grow and develop”) and Item 9 (“I feel my family life is under control”).
• Service System Level (12 items): Captures the parent’s capacity to navigate, interact with, and assert influence over the professional systems providing care, therapeutic treatment, and education to the child. This domain reflects the caregiver’s self-perception as an equal partner in decision-making, their ability to obtain necessary services, maintain ongoing communication with clinical and educational personnel, and monitor service quality. Exemplar items include Item 1 (“I feel that I have a right to approve all services my child receives”) and Item 18 (“My opinion is just as important as professionals’ opinions in deciding what services my child needs”).
• Community/Political Level (10 items): Measures the caregiver’s advocacy efforts and engagement beyond their own child’s immediate needs, extending into collective action, mutual family support, public policy, and institutional reform. It operationalizes a parent’s willingness to support other families, contact legislative representatives, and participate in systemic initiatives aimed at improving services for all children within the broader sociopolitical landscape. Exemplar items include Item 8 (“I get in touch with my legislators when important bills or issues concerning children are pending”) and Item 15 (“I help other families get the services they need”).

The Three Expressions of Empowerment

Orthogonal to the ecological levels, the authors embedded three cognitive-behavioral expressions of empowerment within the items:

• Attitudes, Values, and Beliefs (Knowledge/Perception): The cognitive foundation of empowerment, reflecting what the caregiver knows, their personal sense of entitlement, self-efficacy beliefs, and perception of personal rights within systems (e.g., Item 24: “I know what the rights of parent and children are under the special education laws”).
• Competencies, Skills, and Abilities: The perceived possession of practical operational skills required to resolve issues, obtain information, and negotiate complex interpersonal and institutional environments (e.g., Item 12: “I am able to work with agencies and professionals to decide what services my child needs”).
• Behaviors and Actions: The active, behavioral deployment of skills and knowledge in real-world scenarios, such as contacting lawmakers, asserting opinions during treatment team conferences, or seeking support (e.g., Item 19: “I tell professionals what I think about services being provided to my child”).

Theoretical Framework

The theoretical architecture of the Family Empowerment Scale is synthesised from four foundational psychological and sociological frameworks: Julian Rappaport’s and Marc Zimmerman’s empowerment theories, Albert Bandura’s social cognitive theory, Urie Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory, and the family-centered care paradigm.

Psychological and Social Empowerment Theory

The overarching paradigm draws directly from the foundational work of community psychologist Julian Rappaport, who conceptualized empowerment as a process by which people, organizations, and communities gain mastery over their affairs. Marc Zimmerman subsequently operationalized psychological empowerment (PE) into three interconnected components: the intrapersonal (how people think about their capacity to influence social and political systems, including self-efficacy and perceived control), the interactional (the critical awareness of how systems operate, resource procurement strategies, and problem-solving), and the behavioral (concrete actions taken to exert control, such as organizational participation and collective action). The FES maps directly onto Zimmerman’s tripartite conceptualization, translating abstract intrapersonal, interactional, and behavioral dimensions into tangible caregiving experiences.

Social Cognitive Theory and Perceived Self-Efficacy

The Family subscale heavily incorporates Albert Bandura‘s Social Cognitive Theory, specifically the construct of parental self-efficacy. Bandura postulated that an individual’s belief in their capability to execute behaviors necessary to produce specific performance attainments determines how they feel, think, motivate themselves, and behave. In families of children with severe emotional disturbances or neurodevelopmental disorders, parental self-efficacy is consistently threatened by recurrent behavioral disruptions, diagnostic ambiguities, and social stigma. The FES operationalizes empowerment not merely as external advocacy, but as an internal restoration of perceived agency, mastery, and coping competence within the primary family setting.

Ecological Systems Theory

By delineating empowerment across Family, Service System, and Community/Political levels, the FES explicitly reflects Urie Bronfenbrenner‘s Ecological Systems Theory:

• Microsystem: The immediate environment of the home (Family Level).
• Mesosystem: The bidirectional interactions between the home and external service agencies, such as clinics, hospitals, and schools (Service System Level).
• Exosystem and Macrosystem: The formal social structures, laws, legislative actions, cultural beliefs, and systemic policies that indirectly govern the child’s development and access to resources (Community/Political Level).

The scale acknowledges that true caregiver empowerment cannot exist solely at the microsystemic level; families must develop systemic competence to interact effectively across ecological boundaries.

Family-Centered Care and Partnership Paradigms

The scale was developed concurrently with the systemic shift toward family-centered models of intervention (pioneered by Carl Dunst, Carol Trivette, and colleagues). Family-centered philosophy posits that optimal developmental and therapeutic outcomes occur when human service professionals treat parents as equal partners, respect family autonomy, support family decision-making, and build upon family strengths rather than focusing exclusively on clinical deficits. The FES provides the quantitative infrastructure necessary to assess whether service systems actually succeed in fostering this collaborative ethos.

Validity

The psychometric validity of the Family Empowerment Scale has been rigorously evaluated across clinical samples, community populations, and cross-cultural cohorts.

Construct Validity

During the initial validation study conducted by Koren, DeChillo, and Friesen (1992), construct validity was evaluated using a nationwide sample of 440 parents of children with severe emotional disabilities. The sample was drawn from family support organizations, advocacy groups, and mental health service clinics. A known-groups validation strategy was employed by comparing parents who were active members of family advocacy organizations against parents who were not affiliated with advocacy networks. As hypothesized, parents actively engaged in advocacy groups scored significantly higher on the Community/Political subscale (t = 8.12, p < .001) and the Service System subscale (t = 4.35, p < .001) than unaffiliated parents, confirming the scale’s sensitivity to documented advocacy behavior.

Convergent Validity

Convergent validity has been extensively demonstrated through statistically significant, theoretically consistent correlations with instruments measuring related parenting and coping constructs:

• Parenting Sense of Competence (PSOC): Significant positive correlations have been repeatedly documented between the FES Family subscale and the PSOC Satisfaction and Efficacy subscales (r values typically ranging between .48 and .62, p < .001), indicating that perceived family empowerment aligns with core maternal and paternal self-competence.
• Parent Locus of Control (PLOC): The FES Family and Service System subscales demonstrate moderate-to-strong negative correlations with parental external locus of control and parental helplessness indices (r = -.41 to -.55, p < .001), confirming that higher empowerment corresponds to lower perceived systemic helplessness.
• Family Support Scale (FSS): Significant positive associations are found between the FES Service System and Community subscales and access to formal and informal social support networks (r = .35 to .49, p < .01).

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity has been verified by evaluating the relationships between FES subscale scores and unrelated sociodemographic or affective variables:

• Parental Depression and General Psychopathology: Although empowerment is moderately and inversely correlated with parental distress, correlations between FES subscales and standard depression inventories (such as the Beck Depression Inventory) remain modest (r = -.22 to -.34), demonstrating that empowerment is distinct from generalized depressive symptom severity.
• Socioeconomic Status (SES): Research across heterogeneous samples indicates that FES subscale scores do not exhibit high shared variance with household income or parental educational attainment alone (correlations generally between .08 and .18), proving that psychological empowerment operates as an independent psychological construct rather than a simple proxy for socioeconomic privilege.

Predictive and Criterion Validity

Multiple longitudinal and cross-sectional investigations show that baseline FES scores significantly predict concrete behavioral outcomes. High Service System empowerment scores significantly predict active caregiver participation in Individualized Education Program (IEP) conferences, increased frequency of attendance at clinical review meetings, higher service retention, and lower rates of unilateral treatment discontinuation. Furthermore, longitudinal increases in caregiver Family empowerment scores during behavioral parent training correlate significantly with decreases in child externalizing disruptive behaviors measured via the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL).

Reliability

The Family Empowerment Scale exhibits exceptional internal consistency and temporal stability across diverse clinical and cultural research contexts.

Internal Consistency Reliability

In the seminal psychometric investigation by Koren, DeChillo, and Friesen (1992; N = 440), high internal consistency was established using Cronbach’s alpha coefficients across all three subscales:

• Family Subscale (12 items): α = .88
• Service System Subscale (12 items): α = .87
• Community/Political Subscale (10 items): α = .88
• Total Scale (34 items): α = .94

Subsequent psychometric replications have consistently reaffirmed these parameters across varying diagnostic populations. In an independent validation study by Singh and colleagues (1995) among parents of children with serious emotional disorders, internal consistency coefficients were .87 for Family, .89 for Service System, and .88 for Community/Political. Similarly, studies validating the FES in pediatric autism spectrum disorder (ASD) cohorts (e.g., Weiss et al., 2013) have reported alpha values ranging between .85 and .91 across subscales.

Test-Retest Reliability and Stability

Temporal stability was originally assessed across a random subsample of caregivers re-evaluated over a 2- to 3-week test-retest interval. Pearson product-moment correlation coefficients indicated substantial stability:

• Family Subscale: r = .83 (p < .001)
• Service System Subscale: r = .77 (p < .001)
• Community/Political Subscale: r = .85 (p < .001)

Standard Error of Measurement (SEM) analyses confirm that the scale provides high measurement precision, making it appropriate for tracking individual-level change across clinical interventions.

Factor Analysis

The dimensional structure of the Family Empowerment Scale has been extensively evaluated through both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) across diverse international populations.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

During the scale’s initial operationalization, Koren et al. (1992) conducted an exploratory principal axis factoring procedure with oblique (Promax) rotation, accommodating the theoretical expectation that empowerment dimensions are correlated. The exploratory factor extraction yielded a clear three-factor solution based on the Kaiser criterion (eigenvalues > 1.0) and scree plot inspection. Together, the three extracted factors accounted for over 46% of the total variance in the item pool:

• Factor 1 (Family): Items assessing direct parenting management, home stability, crisis resolution, and personal understanding of the child loaded cleanly on this factor (factor loadings ranging from .42 to .74). Cross-loadings onto the other two factors were minimal (< .25).
• Factor 2 (Service System): Items concerning parent-professional interaction, service rights, decision-making, and navigating organizational service delivery networks loaded prominently on Factor 2 (loadings ranging from .40 to .71).
• Factor 3 (Community/Political): Items evaluating participation in policy, contacting elected officials, community education, and peer-to-peer parent support loaded strongly on Factor 3 (loadings ranging from .44 to .78).

Inter-factor correlations in the initial EFA confirmed that while the three subscales share significant common variance (correlations between .41 and .56), they represent sufficiently distinct facets of empowerment to warrant individual subscale interpretation.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Subsequent structural equation modeling across multiple independent investigations has compared alternative factorial models, including a single-factor unidimensional model, a three-factor orthogonal model, and a three-factor correlated model. Across studies (e.g., Curtis & Singh, 1996; Wakimizu et al., 2011; Florian & Elad, 1998), the correlated three-factor model consistently demonstrates superior fit to empirical data over unidimensional alternatives:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): .91 to .94
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): .90 to .93
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): .048 to .062 (with 90% confidence intervals below .070)
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): .051 to .058

Measurement invariance testing across diverse caregiver demographics has supported configural, metric, and scalar invariance across mother and father respondent groups, as well as cross-cultural invariance in translated adaptations across European, Asian, and Middle Eastern clinical samples.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The Family Empowerment Scale is structured as follows:

• Tool Name: Family Empowerment Scale (FES)
• Authors: Paul E. Koren, Neal DeChillo, and Barbara J. Friesen
• Year of Development: 1992
• Format / Administration Mode: Paper-and-pencil self-administered questionnaire, digital/web-based assessment, or structured clinical interview.
• Target Respondent: Biological parents, adoptive parents, foster parents, or primary legal guardians of children and adolescents experiencing emotional, behavioral, developmental, or chronic medical conditions.
• Time Required: Approximately 10 to 15 minutes.
• Total Number of Items: 34 items.
• Response Scale: 5-point Likert rating format:
  • 1 = Not True at all
  • 2 = Mostly not True
  • 3 = Somewhat True
  • 4 = Mostly True
  • 5 = Very True
• Subscale Item Composition:
  • Family Subscale (12 items): Items 2, 4, 7, 9, 16, 21, 26, 27, 29, 31, 33, 34
  • Service System Subscale (12 items): Items 1, 5, 6, 11, 12, 13, 18, 19, 23, 28, 30, 32
  • Community/Political Subscale (10 items): Items 3, 8, 10, 14, 15, 17, 20, 22, 24, 25
• Scoring and Computational Rules:
  • All 34 items are worded in a positive, strengths-based direction; there are no reverse-scored items.
  • Subscale scores can be calculated either as a summed raw score or as a mean item score:
  • Family Subscale: Raw sum ranges from 12 to 60 (Mean score: sum divided by 12, range 1.0 to 5.0).
  • Service System Subscale: Raw sum ranges from 12 to 60 (Mean score: sum divided by 12, range 1.0 to 5.0).
  • Community/Political Subscale: Raw sum ranges from 10 to 50 (Mean score: sum divided by 10, range 1.0 to 5.0).
  • Total Empowerment Score: Summed score ranges from 34 to 170 (Overall mean score: sum divided by 34, range 1.0 to 5.0).
  • Higher scores uniformly indicate higher levels of perceived parental empowerment, agency, and systemic advocacy.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Family Empowerment Scale was originally developed and published in 1992 under federal grant funding at the Research and Training Center on Family Support and Children’s Mental Health (Regional Research Institute for Human Services, Portland State University). Because its development was supported by public and federal funds aimed at enhancing services for children and families, the instrument was placed in the public domain for research and clinical non-profit applications.

Researchers, healthcare organizations, educational institutions, and clinicians are permitted to use, reproduce, and administer the Family Empowerment Scale free of charge, provided that proper academic attribution is given to the original authors (Koren, DeChillo, & Friesen, 1992) and Portland State University. Commercial redistribution, integration into proprietary for-profit clinical software platforms, or fee-based packaging requires prior written consent from the copyright administrators or the Regional Research Institute for Human Services at Portland State University.

References

• Curtis, W. J., & Singh, N. N. (1996). Family involvement and empowerment in mental health service planning for children with emotional and behavioral disorders. Journal of Child and Family Studies, 5(2), 209–217. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02234681
• Dunst, C. J., Trivette, C. M., & Deal, A. G. (1988). Enabling and empowering families: Principles and guidelines for practice. Brookline Books.
• Florian, V., & Elad, D. (1998). The impact of culture on family empowerment: A comparison between Israeli Jewish and Arab parents of children with special needs. Journal of Social Work Research and Evaluation, 2(1), 17–31.
• Koren, P. E., DeChillo, N., & Friesen, B. J. (1992). Measuring empowerment in families whose children have emotional disabilities: A brief questionnaire. Rehabilitation Psychology, 37(4), 305–321. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0079106
• Koren, P. E., DeChillo, N., & Friesen, B. J. (2007). Family Empowerment Scale. In J. Fischer & K. J. Corcoran (Eds.), Measures for clinical practice and research: A sourcebook (4th ed., Vol. 1, pp. 285–287). Oxford University Press.
• Rappaport, J. (1987). Terms of empowerment/exemplars of prevention: Toward a theory for community psychology. American Journal of Community Psychology, 15(2), 121–148. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00919275
• Singh, N. N., Curtis, W. J., Ellis, C. R., Nicholson, G. H., Villani, T. M., & Wechsler, H. A. (1995). Psychometric analysis of the Family Empowerment Scale. Journal of Emotional and Behavioral Disorders, 3(2), 85–91. https://doi.org/10.1177/106342669500300203
• Wakimizu, R., Fujioka, H., & Yoneyama, S. (2011). Factor structure and psychometric properties of the Japanese version of the Family Empowerment Scale (FES). Nursing & Health Sciences, 13(4), 461–467. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1442-2018.2011.00642.x
• Weiss, J. A., Cappadocia, M. C., MacMullin, J. A., Viecili, M., & Lunsky, Y. (2013). The impact of child problem behaviors on parental mental health: The mediating role of acceptance and empowerment. Autism, 17(3), 261–274. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361312460666
• Zimmerman, M. A. (1995). Psychological empowerment: Issues and illustrations. American Journal of Community Psychology, 23(5), 581–599. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02506983

Items of the Scale