How we score you — and what it means.

SA CoParents is an educational and preparation tool. Whenever we show you a score, this page tells you exactly where that number came from, what it measures, and where it stops.

1. Mediation Readiness (0–100)

What it measures. Your preparation across four dimensions:

• Child-focused focus — the specificity + child-directed framing of the goals you named.
• Priorities clarity — whether you've ranked and rationalised your top mediation topics.
• Communication readiness — your self-assessed patterns around requests, listening, and de-escalation.
• Emotional regulation — the presence of concrete plans for reacting to triggers.

How it's calculated. Deterministic rule-based scoring of the fields you fill in: word-count thresholds, presence of required components, penalty for one-word answers. The exact rules live in backend/summary_scoring.py. There is no ML model in this score.

What it does NOT measure. The score cannot see emotional labor, real-world power dynamics, or coercion. A high score means you've written a lot of child-focused content — it does not mean mediation will be safe or successful for your specific family.

2. Safety step

Safety questions are answered privately on SACOparentsAlign, not in this app. This app does not score safety answers, and its reports show only “Safety step: completed on SACOparentsAlign” or, when this app can't know, “Safety step: see SACOparentsAlign”. If you are in danger, call 911 or the National DV Hotline at 1-800-799-7233.

3. AI Coach responses

The interactive coach uses Anthropic Claude 4.5 via the Emergent LLM key. Prompts are constrained by a system instruction that forbids diagnosis, dosage advice, legal advice, or crisis triage. When triggered by risk keywords, the coach immediately surfaces hotlines and the Get help page. AI responses are not stored on Anthropic's servers for training. See our Privacy Policy for details.

5. "Your next three steps" recommendation engine

Deterministic, not AI. Given your latest scores across all assessments, a fixed decision table picks up to three highest-leverage next actions. Rule source: backend/next_steps_routes.py. This means the same inputs always produce the same recommendations — an important transparency guarantee.

Where we lack empirical validation

SA CoParents is a new tool. The Mediation Readiness, Special Needs 7-domain, and Communication Readiness scores are not yet externally validated by a peer-reviewed study. We are actively collecting anonymized outcome signals (with opt-in consent) to publish reliability + concurrent-validity work in future.

In the meantime, use every score as a conversation starter with your mediator or therapist — not as the last word.

Change log & scoring history

Every meaningful change to a scoring rule is recorded in the public repository at github.com/mattsossi-cmyk/sacoparents-app. If a rule change would materially shift your historical scores, we recompute in a way that keeps your longitudinal chart honest: we snapshot the version tag alongside each stored score, and only recompute forward.

Questions or peer review requests

SA CoParents · 16607 Blanco #703, San Antonio, Texas 78232