The purpose of the Kawa Model as an assessment is often to use this assessment for building the client's occupational profile during the interview process. The Kawa model is used to support a client-centered and holistic approach to understanding the client's strengths, barriers, goals, physical and social environment, well-being, and occupations using symbolism.

The five main components of the Kawa Model as an assessment are: 

1. The River Flow or Water: flow of life and priorities

2. The bottom and walls of the river: positive and negative aspects of the client's physical and social environment

3. Rocks: What the client sees as their obstacles and challenges in life

4. Driftwood: Positive and negative personal aspects and resources

5. Spaces inbetween: opportunities to expand life and the river flow, goals for occupation and well-being

(Iwama & Teoh, 2015; Morin, 2024)

No explicit scoring procedure as this is an interview-based assessment. The data is qualitative and criterion-based as what the client details for their river flow, driftwood, river bank, spaces between, and rocks determine what questions the interviewer will ask.

As this is a non-standardized interview assessment, there is no normative data for this assessment. This is also a relatively new assessment tool so there is not a lot of data collection to build psychometric data.

From a literature review from Ober et al., the Kawa Model as an assessment tool has been found to help gather data to better understand the client's unique perspectives, priorities, experiences, supports, barriers, environmental and social contexts in order to build a highly individualized and client-centered plan of care (2022).