Whose Problem Is It?

How Understanding Contextual Factors Influences Our Ability to Accurately Assess

Assessment is often described as a neutral process — a way of understanding what is happening so we can respond thoughtfully and effectively. Practitioners listen for symptoms, behaviors, patterns, and distress. Information is gathered, questions are asked, and meaning is made.

What often goes unnamed is a more foundational question: Whose problem is being identified?

When sociocultural and political factors are not part of assessment, individuals, families, groups, and communities are more likely to be understood as having problems within them, rather than as people responding to the conditions around them. This is rarely intentional. It is often a reflection of how assessment is structured, taught, and constrained.

When Context Is Missing

When context is absent from assessment, people’s responses can be misunderstood. Stress reactions are interpreted as symptoms. Protective behaviors are read as avoidance or resistance. Families and communities are described through deficit-based language without attention to the realities they are navigating.

This shows up at multiple levels of practice. Individuals may be labeled as disordered. Families may be framed as noncompliant. Communities may be described as high-risk or hard to engage. In each case, the conditions shaping behavior remain largely unexamined.

Making sociocultural and political conditions invisible in assessment does not make them go away. They continue to impact what people are experiencing. Making them invisible leads to inaccurate assessment, lack of validation, and overall harm.

Sociocultural and Political Conditions Shape Experience

Sociocultural and political conditions influence how people live, relate, and survive. Racism, immigration policy, economic instability, surveillance, and access to resources shape emotional life and daily decision-making. Structural oppression and all of its negative impacts cannot be understated. This is serious business with serious consequences.

When these conditions are not explicitly accounted for, they still influence how distress is understood and responded to. Anxiety, withdrawal, irritability, or disengagement may reflect adaptation to threat or uncertainty rather than individual pathology. Without context, assessment risks misidentifying what is actually happening.

A Current Example: Immigration Enforcement and Community Stress

Many communities are currently experiencing heightened stress related to immigration enforcement by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Reports of people being detained — including U.S. citizens, individuals with legal residency, pending asylum cases, protected status, and non-violent criminal records — have created widespread fear, particularly in Black and Brown communities.

Parents are keeping their children home from school out of concern for family safety. Children are experiencing anxiety, worried that if they attend school, their parents may not be there when they return home. The fear is ongoing and grounded in real experiences and credible threat.

How this situation is understood by school administrators, teachers, and mental health practitioners matters. Assessment decisions shape whether harm is compounded or support is provided.

A teenager who is afraid their parents could be deported may be described as having an anxiety disorder. A family keeping children home from school may be viewed through a lens of truancy or neglect. These interpretations are not inevitable. They reflect how context is — or is not — being considered.

In other settings, schools may choose to communicate clearly with families, provide reassurance, and make explicit commitments to protecting students. Practitioners may recognize fear as a reasonable response to current conditions and focus on support, safety, and connection rather than diagnosis. Of course, with insurance there often has to be a diagnosis. It is still critical to articulate the full picture to clients so they feel validated in their experience and know that the practitioner understands what is actually happening.

How Lack of Context Shapes Practice

When practitioners are not oriented to sociopolitical context, assessment and intervention are affected. Distress is more likely to be individualized. Interventions may focus on regulation or compliance rather than validation, support, and empowerment. Families may be blamed for decisions made under duress. Trust between communities and institutions may erode further.

In schools, this can lead to disciplinary or reporting responses rather than care. In clinical settings, it can result in diagnoses and treatment plans that do not reflect the source of distress. Over time, practitioners and clients may experience frustration when interventions fail to create change because the conditions producing harm remain unaddressed.

Reorienting Assessment Toward Accuracy

Social justice-based (aka anti-oppressive practice, aka justice-based practice) assessment begins with different assumptions. It attends to what people are responding to, not just how they are responding. It recognizes that fear, vigilance, withdrawal, and distress often make sense within the realities people are facing. It asks us to look at whose problem is this.

This does not mean minimizing individual suffering. It means understanding it within the conditions that shape it. Accurate assessment requires attention to systems, policies, and power, along with humility about the limits of individual-level explanations. It also means that we can collaborate with clients on a plan for how to address what’s going on. Some people will need help with emotional regulation as well as safety planning. Others will want to engage in advocacy. Some folks will need help making difficult decisions that affect their futures.

Why This Matters

Assessment shapes intervention, policy, and professional response. When problems are located inaccurately, harm follows. When context is ignored, people are asked to carry the weight of conditions they did not create.

Ethical and effective practice depends on understanding the realities people are living within. It requires locating distress accurately and responding in ways that validate experience rather than obscure it. Asking whose problem is being named is not an abstract exercise. It is central to how harm is either reproduced or interrupted in practice. 

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