James Caiels, Barbora Silarova, Alisoun Milne, Julie Beadle-Brown
A new approach to social work and social care services has been developed, called a ‘strengths-based approach’. This means having conversations with people about their skills, interests and resources to consider how they can help each person. It is the opposite of a ‘deficit’ approach, which looks at what people are lacking or need.
Examples of people’s ‘strengths’ include personal resources (such as family and friends that may help them), social networks (such as a book club, social club or faith group), or community resources (such as a library, community centre, or a gym) that can be used to enable people to live the best life that they can.
Although strengths-based approaches are popular, we don’t understand how best to evaluate them, or measure their impact for people accessing services.
The results from this work help us to understand:
We invited a group of experts to take part in a special kind of survey (called a ‘Delphi consensus’ survey), which is used to agree the most important things to measure. The Delphi consensus survey was used to reduce the long list of results or benefits to a shorter number of the most important ones. The experts did this by completing the survey over two rounds.
For this work ‘expert’ was defined as: “a person familiar with strengths-based approaches as well as the measurement and evaluation of social care and social work.” This included other academic researchers, social workers, and local authority directors of social care.
Two public involvement and engagement advisors were involved throughout the work. They looked at and commented on the survey, documents used for recruiting participants, and the reporting of the results.
Fifteen experts took part in the first round, and 11 completed the second round. By the end of the Delphi consensus process, the experts agreed that 26 out of 39 results or benefits (about 67%) were both important and practical to measure when evaluating strengths-based approaches in adult social care and social work. They also found that eight results or benefits were important but not practical to measure.
This study offers a list of results or benefits that practitioners, researchers, and policymakers can use to evaluate strengths-based approaches in adult social care and social work.
