The Department of Research and Evaluation Services had developed a method for strengths-based assessment of persons that is considerably more direct than some measures currently in use, such as level of trust, or the Search Institute approach. The Capacities Inventory takes stock of the internal resources of the person, while the Assets Inventory documents their social resources. Assets are defined as resources - including people, associations, material objects, and institutions - which are accessible through a relationship and which people use to achieve goals, meet needs, or just get things done. Capacities are resources internal to the individual - experiences, knowledge, skills, habits, and characteristics - which are under the direct control of the individual. Put another way, assets are the social face of strengths, capacities are the personal face of individual strengths. Together they add up to the individual’s capability.

Capacities Inventory
The Capacities Inventory is a self-administered, seven-page inventory of 205 skills and abilities, divided up into Communication and Community Skills, Community Participation, Youth Activities, Child Care, Family Support and Parenting, Food, Transportation, Managing and Planning, Office Skills, Maintenance/Repairs, Construction/Repairs, The Arts and Other. It is vocationally oriented. Skills sampled range from "Public speaking", to "Helping a person or family with medical problems", to "Installing/repairing roofing". After completing the inventory, subjects often express surprise at the number of distinct skills they possess.

Assets Inventory
The Assets Inventory is a 3-page, self-administered inventory of 48 social resources, grouped into family, friends and other people, groups and associations, agencies, businesses, and other (two write-in lines). The person responds by recalling first whether they actually used the listed relationship during the past two years, and then, if they used it, how helpful the relationship had been on those occasions when they used it. Helpfulness is a three point scale - not at all helpful, somewhat helpful, and very helpful.

As such, the Assets Inventory amounts to a measure of connectedness between individuals and resources in their social network (i.e., social capital), and it also produces information on the quality of the relationship (i.e., degree of helpfulness). It can of course be used in any combination (pre/post, pre/mid/post), as an interview tool to discover assets, and so forth. As a direct social work intervention, a copy of the completed inventory can be provided to the consumer as a resource map for subsequent reference during problem solving. It is designed for completion by persons aged 13 years or older.

Adaptations of The Assets Inventory
The instrument is direct, simple and flexible. First, subjects report, not their feelings, impressions, or their own assessments, but rather their own behavior over a defined period of the recent past. Based on extensive field experience in the National Survey in 1997 (see below), people do not react strongly to characterizing their social relationships in these terms, so their answers tend to be honest, and therefor reliable.

The list of social resources is very flexible. The generic resources we used for our national survey in 1997 (e.g., "hospital", "neighbor") can be replaced by specific resources (e.g., St. Luke's, your next door neighbor), and the list can be freely expanded. However, doing so limits comparability with the baselines described below.

The Assets Inventory has been translated into vernacular Spanish, so a version for Spanish speakers is currently available. The Capacities Inventory will be available in Spanish if the need arises.

Machine Readable Format
Both English and Spanish versions of the Assets Inventory have been prepared and tested in a machine readable format (Cardiff Teleform), which nearly eliminates data entry and most data entry errors. Output can be in the database of choice, including Access, FoxPro, SPSS, Excel, Lotus, D-Base III, etcetera. Licenses to use the Teleform version of the survey locally are available (see below).

Baselines and Analysis
There is an extensive national baseline. We have a database of 7,500 asset inventories from our 1997 national survey conducted at 89 family service agencies in 26 states around the country. We have analyzed this baseline and published the results in Strength in Adversity: The Resourcefulness of American Families in Need (see below). In 1999 we surveyed 2000 family service clients in Connecticut with the Assets Inventory, yielding a total database of about 10,000.

In addition to narrative interpretation, Strength in Adversity contains rank order tables setting forth national asset patterns in terms of use and helpfulness. The use baseline shows percent of the national survey population which used each social relationship, rank ordered from most to least. The helpfulness baseline shows the percent of resource users who found each resource very helpful, rank ordered from most to least.

Strength in Adversity contains separate use baselines for women and men, welfare recipients and non-recipients, and for small (1-2 persons) and large families (3 or more). The Department has available unpublished 1997 use and helpfulness baselines for Caucasians, African-Americans, and Hispanics. These baselines allow you to compare any particular individual or group of individuals to national patterns in terms of which resources they have used and how helpful their used resources have been. Finally, we have state baseline data for use and helpfulness for consumers in Connecticut, New Jersey, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Ohio.

We have engaged in further analysis of the relationship between use and helfulness of assets, based on our 1999 Connecticut data. We intend to publish this data, and the theory behind it, shortly.

Association Between Assets
We also performed cluster analysis on the responses to determine which resources tended to be used together, and which were not. 12 clusters of resources which tend to be used in common by individuals were defined on the national database. Cluster analysis and patterns of cluster usage by consumers is set forth in Strength in Adversity. This analysis includes a tree diagram graphically displaying the tendency of resources to be used together, with the strength of the tendency represented as the length of the branch connecting the resources. It is also available for the five states with their own baselines.

Other Published Research Based on the Assets Inventory
The following articles are based the Assets Inventory and are available in the Ressearch and Evaluation Services Archives on the Alliance web page.

The social networks of suicidal people (June 2000)

How well do we know consumer strengths? Or, social work assessment meets Godzilla (November 1998)

Costs
We have copyrighted the Assets Inventory and the Capacities Inventory, and both are available at nominal cost from the Research Department. All supporting materials are also available. Per copy prices are as follows:

Automated data entry:
The English and Spanish editions of the Assets Inventory are prepared in machine readable formats. Automated data entry and delivery of a completed clean database are available for $0.75 per form.

Licensing agreements:
Agencies and practitioners who wish to modify the inventory to tailor it to local conditions, and those who wish to use it in bulk can establish licensing agreements with the Research Department at reasonable cost.