Life Skills Progression An Outcome and Intervention Planning Instrument for Use with Families at Risk

A must for home visiting programs, the updated second edition of the LSP is the most efficient, reliable way to evaluate a parent’s life skills: the abilities, behaviors, and attitudes they need to achieve a healthy and satisfying family life. For use with at-risk, low-income pregnant and parenting individuals with children from birth to 5 years of age, the LSP is a field-tested, validated, and reliable tool that generates a broad, accurate portrait of the life skills of parents, caregivers, and young children. Easy to complete in about 10 minutes, the LSP will help your program establish baseline and ongoing assessment profiles of clients, identify strengths and needs, plan interventions, and demonstrate the effectiveness of your practices through monitoring of outcomes.

HOW IT WORKS

Home visitors, including public health nurses, social workers, mental health care providers, and family development and family support workers, use the LSP to evaluate a variety of important life skills. An experienced professional familiar with the family records information on 43 items in eight important domains:

• Relationships with Family and Friends
• Relationships with Children
• Relationships with Supportive Resources
• Education and Employment
• Health and Medical Care
• Mental Health and Substance Abuse
• Basic Essentials
• Infant/Toddler Development

Home visitors rate each competency from 1 to 5 on a simple-to-complete form, where they can also record important case data in the notes section. No judgment of families is implied—the LSP is used only to track the progress of children and parents or caregivers, and can be repeated every six months until the child is 5.

WHAT’S NEW

• New chapter on using the LSP to promote maternal health literacy
• Guidance on completing the LSP during virtual home visits
• LSP Instrument and downloads now provided as fillable PDFs
• Updated research, citations, and information throughout
• Updates and improvements based on customer surveys and feedback from the field
• Scoring descriptions updated for clarity
• Ancillary materials now provided as convenient downloads

Use the LSP with ASQ®-3 & ASQ®:SE-2!

With items that match the ASQ developmental areas, the LSP makes it easy to summarize the developmental data you gathered with the ASQ system.

Linda Wollesen focused her career on public health nursing and collaborative community-based services to low-income and ethnically diverse families. She worked as a nursing visitor in housing projects in East Los Angeles, nursing supervisor in Santa Clara, and program manager in Santa Cruz County, all in California. Her clinical expertise included services and care coordination for children and infants who have special needs or who are in foster care. She also supervised a research replication site for the David Olds Nurse-Family Partnership in Monterey County.

Ms. Wollesen was the developer of the Life Skills Progression™ (LSP) instrument and pioneered the reliability and content work for the tool with the support of a fellowship from ZERO TO THREE: National Center for Infants, Toddlers and Families. She founded the Life Skill Outcomes, LLC, which provides LSP training and best practice consultation and developed an LSP database for use by programs using the LSP.

Brad Richardson, Ph.D., is research scientist and adjunct associate professor at The University of Iowa School of Social Work, where he also serves as co-director of the Consortium for Substance Abuse Research and Evaluation and Research Director of the University of Iowa National Resource Center for Family Centered Practice, promoting culturally responsive family-centered services through research and evaluation, technical assistance, training, and information dissemination. Dr. Richardson is also director of The Center for Public Health Evaluation and Research at the University of Iowa.

One of Dr. Richardson's contributions to science is the development of valid and reliable instruments to assist practitioners in measuring progress—first, to show those with whom they are working their successes and strengths on which to build, and second, to use aggregate results to measure program outcomes for interested stakeholders (e.g., demonstrate outcomes to funders, managers, and administrators) and to inform program staff of the results being achieved in order to improve program and client outcomes. This work brings together career expertise in research and practice: research on reliability and validity of instruments such as the Life Skills Progression, Family Development Matrix, and Automated Assessment of Family Progress, and practice using results to inform family strengthening, case management, and in-home services, where findings suggest interventions focusing on strengths is one of the most efficient and effective methods to support positive change.

Using a family-centered, strengths-based, and culturally responsive frame of reference, Dr. Richardson has conducted well over 100 evaluations of early childhood, child welfare, juvenile justice, public health, education, justice system, mental health, and substance use disorder projects. He has written extensively on racial and ethnic disparities, as well as social determinants of health, and he works to improve service systems in areas such as chronic disease, cancer, and aging. He served as National DMC Coordinator on the Board of the Coalition for Juvenile Justice, testified before the National Academies in support of the Developmental Approach to Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare, and served as Chair of the American Public Health Association's Cancer Forum. He is also a long-standing member and officer of the Iowa Integrated Health Planning and Advisory Council for substance use and mental health issues.