PJI User Guide
PJI Professional User Guide (2018)
Information and academic use only
This document is provided on this website as a reference resource to illustrate the Parenting Judgement Indicator (PJI) as it previously existed, and to explain the developmental ideas that sat behind it.
Important context: the PJI is no longer available for online administration, and this Professional User Guide is unpublished. It is therefore shared here for information, academic interest, and awareness-raising purposes only, rather than as a live manual for current practice or service delivery.
What this guide is
The guide sets out a structured, developmental approach to helping parents and carers reflect on children’s participation in family decision making, using a clear decision-making model (directive, consultative, participative, delegative) and guided professional discussion. It includes worked examples, printable discussion materials, and background on the conceptual and technical development of the instrument.
What this guide is not
Because the PJI is not currently available to complete, this guide must not be treated as an invitation to recreate, republish, retrofit, or informally administer the instrument, nor as a substitute for professional training, supervision, governance, or safeguarding procedures. It is not a diagnostic tool, and it should never be used to label parents, to make high-stakes decisions, or to justify interventions on its own.
A practical “health warning” about interpretation
Even when the PJI was in use, the guide explicitly warns against treating profile outputs as “facts”. Any profile-like information is best understood as a hypothesis that requires careful validation through collaborative discussion and other evidence. Put simply: do not reify scores or allow them to outrun reality.
If you choose to download this document
By downloading or reading this guide, you agree to the spirit of its intended use:
• Use it to understand concepts only.
• Do not treat it as operational guidance for current service delivery.
• Do not adapt it into an unofficial tool, questionnaire, or scoring system.
• Do not rely on it for safeguarding, clinical, legal, or other decisions.
• If you are a practitioner and are interested in the underlying approach (participation, power, developmental decision making), use it as a prompt for reflective practice within your own professional standards, ethics, and governance.
This page exists to preserve and explain an approach that some readers may find thoughtful and useful in principle, while being clear about the limits of what can responsibly be done with an unpublished guide for an instrument that is no longer administered.