How do young people, parents and social workers assess the quality of social work practice?

Overview

The study will produce evidence about what parents, young people and social workers think good practice is and how this compares to an established rating system. It will be the first study in the world to put the views of those receiving social work services at the heart of our understanding of good practice in this way. The findings will be widely shared and will feed into policy and practice developments in Wales and beyond, for instance shaping social work education, practice frameworks and future research. 

Research Questions 

1. Do the groups identify similar or different factors in making decisions? 
2. How consistent are parents, young people and workers (within groups) in their judgements on the quality of social work practice? 
3. What is the level of agreement between groups and with expert coding for quality of practice? 
4. What does each group think is important in defining quality of practice? 

Activities and Methods

The study involves audio recording at least 45 family visits with parents in Welsh local authorities.

We will then undertake two types of analysis. The first applies an existing coding scheme known as SWIM (Social Work and Interviewing Motivationally).

The second method is called “comparative judgement”, which is a method that had been used extensively in the field of education. We will work with groups of parents, care-experienced young people and practitioners to make these comparative judgements

We will compare the rankings of the three groups with each other as well as SWIM through statistical analysis. We will also conduct qualitative analysis on the contextual information gathered for each recording and the assessor rationales. We will run collaborative sense-making activities with each group of assessors and our Local Authority partners to explore and refine our initial findings.  

Findings

This Research is ongoing