Overview
The eco-map and the genogram are the most widely used family assessment tools in social work and family therapy. Social work scholar Ann Hartman introduced them together in a 1978 article as paper-and-pencil diagrams that let worker and client look at complex family relationships and their environment on a single page. The genogram views the family along the axis of time (generations); the eco-map views it in space (the surrounding environment).
The genogram
The genogram grew out of Bowen family systems theory, and McGoldrick and Gerson standardized its symbols and conventions.
- Basic symbols: males are squares, females circles, and the index person is drawn with a double line. A deceased person has an X inside the symbol, with age or years of birth and death.
- Structure: partners are joined by a horizontal line (male on the left, female on the right), with children below in birth order from the left. One slash marks separation, two slashes divorce, and a dotted line encloses the current household.
- Relationships: different lines show fused, close, distant, conflictual or cut-off relationships.
- Information recorded: marriages, divorces and deaths, occupations and education, illness and addiction, migration and family roles.
- Interpretation: look for patterns repeated across generations (alcohol problems, divorce, triangles), sibling position, events clustered around life-cycle transitions, and alliances and conflicts.
The eco-map
The eco-map puts an ecological view, as in ecological systems theory, into a diagram.
- Drawing: the household is placed in a large central circle, with outside systems such as school, work, extended family, friends, faith groups, health care and social services in smaller circles around it.
- Connecting lines: thick solid lines for strong ties, thin lines for ordinary ties, dashed lines for tenuous ties and hatched lines for stressful or conflictual ones, with arrows showing the direction in which energy and resources flow.
- Interpretation: identify supportive and missing resources, where conflict is concentrated and how isolated the family is, and find services to link them with.
Use in practice
- Assessment: they organize a great deal of information quickly in early interviews and help locate problems in the context of family and environment rather than in one individual. They are the standard way of applying family systems theory to a real case.
- Intervention planning: eco-maps help set resource-linking goals in case management; genograms are used mainly in family therapy on intergenerational patterns. Redrawing them after intervention shows what has changed.
- Client engagement: drawing them together builds rapport and helps clients see their situation in a new way, so the process is itself an intervention.
- Cautions: because they touch on sensitive family history, workers should respect the client's consent and pace, avoid imposing their own interpretation, remember that each diagram is a snapshot in time, and protect confidentiality.
References
- Hartman, A. (1978). Diagrammatic assessment of family relationships. Social Casework, 59(8), 465–476.
- McGoldrick, M., Gerson, R., & Petry, S. (2020). Genograms: Assessment and Treatment (4th ed.). New York: W. W. Norton.