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catmaddan
It is important for social workers to understand the evaluation…
It is important for social workers to understand the evaluation methods and what a successful termination looks like. two to four scholarly sources in addition to the textbook, address the following:
Types of Evaluation:
Discuss different types of evaluation and why it is important for generalist practice.
Using the format in Chapter 9 of your text, read the case study about Carmen provided in Chapter 9 and a goal attainment measure (GAS) that you would use for this client. What is the benefit of this type of evaluation is compared with the other types of evaluation? Refer to Social Work Disposition #3: Value: Dignity and Worth of a Person; Ethical Principle: Social workers respect the inherent dignity and worth of a person in this portion of the assignment.
Successful Termination:
Describe a successful termination with the client and what your follow-up might entail. Explain possible barriers and how you would deal with possible barriers.
Case Study: Goal Attainment Measure:
Case Study: Adoption in a Rural SettingCarmen’s knuckles were white as she gripped the steering wheel. She drove carefully, only 5 miles per hour. Not because the speed limit was 5 miles per hourit was 10 in the mobile home parkbut because she did not want to get where she was going. Carmen had been working with Andrea for 18 months, and today was their last meeting. When she arrived at the trailer, Carmen wasn’t out of the car before Andrea was throwing herself into her arms. At a tall 14, Andrea was leaning down to hug Carmen, her blond hair mixing with Carmen’s jet black ponytail. They both knew it was their last meeting. Tears were streaming down over Andrea’s flushed cheeks, and Carmen had to admit that tears were filling her eyes as well. As Carmen got out of the car, she put her arm around Andrea’s waist, and they walked toward the trailer where Andrea’s new parents waited.
They went inside and slid around the table to find seats. Carmen saw that Andrea’s parents were beaming. They had been Andrea’s foster parents for 6 months and then completed a successful request to adopt her. Carmen was right there the whole time. She had been handed the Snyder application to be foster parents and had built relationships, done an in-home assessment of the safety of the place, and assessed the appropriateness of the family. This part had been hard. The Snyders, a Caucasian family, were not comfortable working with Carmen at first. She was Latina, and they weren’t used to having relationships with Latinas. In fact, they lived in a rural area that was mainly made up of white people, and they both grew up surrounded by the stereotypes people develop when they have few interactions with others. More than once, Carmen had to self-reflect on the strong feelings she had when the family rejected her help. But when the Snyders saw Carmen working hard to help them, appearing at the trailer week after week, month after month, they began to trust her entirely.Carmen had prepared both Andrea and the Snyders for the transition from Andrea’s residential placement to a home and watched all three of them manage that transition with her help. She helped the Snyder family to understand their extended family with a genogram and helped Andrea find her place in it. An ecomap showed Open Door Adoption as a positive resource for the family, and they all came to see the agency as a reliable source of support. This idea was cemented when Carmen stepped in and advocated for Andrea to start at her new school in the middle of the academic year when the building administration was dragging its feet.Carmen, in fact, was the face of Open Door’s consistent support. She was there when David, Jackie, and Andrea decided to create a forever family, and she helped them set goals and make plans for that to happen. Sometimes she helped them get over conflicts, and other times she listened while they shared their joys. Carmen grinned a little through her tears as she remembered the time Andrea bounded out of the trailer to tell her about their first parent-teacher conference. It was the first time in her life that she had parents attending. And now the paperwork was complete, the celebrations ended, and it was time for Open Door Adoption to close the case. To Andrea’s parents, this marked a new beginning for their family. They wouldn’t be reporting to the agency how Andrea was doing in school, how she made out at the dentist’s office, how they were all getting along . . . nothing. They’d be left on their own, and they couldn’t wait. “Now, we’re going to be normal,” said Jackie, with a broad smile. Carmen quickly wiped her eyes and got out the Snyder file. She bent over the most recent case recording page to hide her sad face and wrote the date more slowly and carefully than was needed. When she was composed, she put on a bright smile and said, “It looks like we’re all having strong feelings today. Let’s take turns talking about them.”
When Carmen began her work with Andrea and her new parents, she had two basic questions. First, she wondered what types of implementation would be best to help all of the family members call themselves a family. She wanted to know the best method for helping the family to develop a sense of unity. She suspected that she would have achieved that goal when Andrea would start to call David and Jackie Mom and Dad since that goal had all of the qualities of good practice wisdom: It was a tradition in the agency that a child who called their adoptive parents Mom and Dad was on their way to a pretty smooth transition to a forever home. This idea had the authority of her supervisor, who had worked in the field of adoption for many years, and it made common sense. All together, these elements indicated legitimate practice wisdom (Rubin & Babbie, 2017; see Figure 9.4).Second, Carmen had another question as she approached the scientific literature: She wanted to know what types of agency policy and programming would best help the family feel united.
So Carmen began the second step of the evidence-based practice process. She conducted a literature review. First, she went to the website of the NASW and signed in as a member. She used the journal Social Work published by NASW because as an NASW member she could get full articles for free, but mainly she used the journal because she knew that it was peer reviewed. In other words, reputable social work researchers had read each article, asked for revisions, and approved the final product.In the NASW website, Carmen clicked on Resources and Information and the journal Social Work. She went to the advanced search bar and searched “foster care” and “adoption.” She saw that some of the results that she got were very old, so she sorted the search by “newest to oldest.” Eventually she found an article that contained both foster care and adoption called “In-Home Implementation with Families in Distress” (Waisbrod, Buchbiner, & Possick, 2012). That article was qualitativewhere the data studied were words. In this study, the words analyzed were case studies. Carmen felt that an article with four in-depth case studies might teach her something about her work with this family. She learned that in-home implementations seemed to be successful and that families can be helped by encouraging them to make stories, or narratives, about their lives. The situations in the case studies were not exactly like Andrea’s, but Carmen felt like she got some good ideas that could be transferable to her case. In other words, the situation that concerned her seemed similar enough to the case studies to transfer the findings of the study to her thinking about Andrea and her parents. Carmen knew from her research class that she could not generalize the article’s findings to other cases because the sample (four cases) was so small. In other words, she shouldn’t feel confident that she could repeat exactly what the workers did in the case studies, but she could use the case studies to get some good ideas. In addition to developing some support for the idea that home visits were helpful as agency policies in adoption agencies, she learned that a useful implementation method with families of foster care and adoption is the use of a photo album to help families tell stories about unity. The article noted that the use of a photo album is based in narrative theory. Carmen wondered whether the use of narrative in the planned change process was evidence-based, so she looked up narrative theory. She didn’t find much about that in Social Work, so she knew she had to go further. Using Google Scholar, she searched “narrative” and “adoption” and found a peer-reviewed article called “Adoption Narratives, Trauma, and Origins” (Homans, 2006). She quickly saw that this article reviewed the importance for adoptive families to create their own stories about their family origins. Next, she checked the photo album idea with her supervisor. Her supervisor’s practice wisdom supported the idea of using the photo album to help the family tell their past story and move forward. She told Carmen that this was a technique used by some of the workers at her agency as a regular practice. Carmen thought it made sense.
Carmen’s process included the following steps in evaluating for evidence-based practice (also see Figure 9.5):Developed a research question Searched for evidence in peer-reviewed journals Evaluated the articles she found to see if they were up to date and whether the research methods seemed to fit the research question Considered how the article sampled participants and whether the article might be appropriate for her client system Checked her conclusions using her supervisor’s practice wisdom, her values, and her clients’ preferences.
When she saw that the Snyders’ trailer included a small shelf for photo albums, Carmen asked if they would be willing to look at them as a way of thinking about their family. She told them that there were other things they could do, like develop a journal or a scrapbook. David and Jackie liked the picture idea. Andrea was excited to see David and Jackie in their younger days. Andrea saw a side of her parents that she hadn’t seen before. As they told stories about their families and their activities in the past, Andrea was spellbound. Finally, Carmen suggested that they begin to print out some of the current photos they had on their phones. There were many that included all three of them, and as they began to choose some photos to print, they began to tell their story as a family waiting for a special child and carrying the story forward to include the new photos of the special child herself. During this time, they were creating a family narrative that helped to cement their relationships. It was during this meeting that Carmen asked Andrea to consider calling David and Jackie Mom and Dad. She asked Andrea what she thought of that. Andrea smiled shyly and nodded her head. David and Jackie looked at each other and smiled broadly, and both of them wiped tears from their eyes. Carmen pointed out that calling David and Jackie Mom and Dad could become an objective of theirs to help carry out their overall goal to become a permanent family. All three were enthusiastic. Carmen was happy to know that she and the family had created a measurable goal that they could work on right away and in the future. By the end of the meeting, everyone had laughed and cried. Carmen asked them to go over her own entrance into the family system and how she had played a role in getting the family together. That way, she became part of the narrative as well. Andrea took a picture of Carmen to put into the album. Carmen felt good about the implementation process and the way they had developed a new objective even though she was carrying out termination. Her goal was measurable, so she could use a measurement instrument called goal attainment scaling (GAS), which we’ll talk about in a minute. Not only did she have a measurable goal for now and the future, but she knew that if she ever needed to help her agency understand the importance of home visits as a standard policy in adoption permanency planning, she could easily provide empirical support as well as practice wisdom.
Checking for progress is an evaluation that happens over and over again throughout implementation. For that reason, progress evaluation is often informal evaluation. As we’ve said, it can involve a simple interaction within the social work interview that has the clear purpose of checking on clients’ progress of reaching their goals. Use an opening statement when you are conducting informal evaluation. For Carmen, the process looked like this during a meeting in her office at the agency:Carmen: Good morning. Thanks for being here. I know you’ve been having some car trouble, so I really appreciate your finding a way to get here. (engagement, display of empathy, affirmation)David: We borrowed a car from neighbors.Carmen: As you know, here at Open Door we work to help kids find forever homes. (agency function) My job is to support the adoption process. (worker role) I’d like to spend the next few minutes finding out how well we’re doing. (length of time, meeting purpose) Does that make sense to all of you? Is there any immediate problem that we should address before we get into this? (assess for crisis)Jackie: No problems here. I want to talk about Andrea’s grades, but that can wait until later. Carmen: David? David: All good. Carmen: Andrea? Andrea: Everything’s okay. Carmen: Okay, let’s get started then. Would you please talk about your experience of Open Door so far? When an opening statement is used, both the worker and the client system are very clear about the fact that evaluation is going on. That will make everyone stop and think about their opinions on their goal achievement. In addition to conversations about goal attainment, it is possible to have formal process evaluations. These take the form of established measures of success. They could take the form of scales, like the Hope Index you completed in Chapter 3. Formal process evaluations may also take the form of tests about knowledge. For example, if you were helping a bunch of girls learn about intimate partner violence, you might give them a multiple-choice test about the behaviors that are considered to be abusive before you begin work with them. Then you’d repeat the test afterward to see what they learned. If you imagine those girls taking that test, you can see that the test itself will help them to learn. In work with families, groups, organizations, and communities, you might give the same scale or test to every participant or you might just test the client representative. For example, if you were helping an organization to be more responsive to staff needs you might give a Job Satisfaction Scale to all of the employees. If you were working with a town, you might ask the borough council to participate in an evaluation, or you might just give it to the council manager.
GAS can be used with systems of all sizes to measure the effectiveness of services (Rubin & Babbie, 2017). To use the GAS, you identify a small number of goals and make sure that their objectives are measurable. Remember that in work with individuals, families, or groups, the goals are developed between the client or client system representative and the worker, and each goal is accomplished through a series of objectives. In work with organizations and communities, the goals are based on the mission of the agency, and they, too, have specific objectives that are used to carry them out. Because the GAS forces you and the client or client system representative to be specific about outcomes for each objective, both of you are clear about what you are working toward. If you are clear about what you are working toward, you will know when you have achieved success. Success may be related to knowledge gained (like individual information on parenting skills or community literacy levels), status changes (like going from homelessness to sheltered or from a community’s high unemployment to low unemployment), or improvement of a condition (like from a mental illness to wellness or from an organization’s inaccessible building to an accessible one). The GAS measures various levels of success, so it can be used as motivation or a call for work. Consider the possible outcomes for each objective and rank them from +2 to -2. Zero is the expected outcome.
Consider this example: Carmen and Andrea’s family were working toward successful adoption. The most fundamental objective Carmen’s agency used to move toward that goal was the completion of a large packet of complicated forms. The family needed to complete the forms before the adoption was finalized. Since some of the forms required a specific activity, like getting a physical, the enormous task was easy to put off. Carmen knew that most families had trouble with the paperwork, so she wanted to know the status of the objective in an ongoing way. She also wanted to provide some motivation. The GAS seemed perfect. Here’s how it looked:
Once Carmen began to get scores on the GAS, she was able to record them and place them on a chart that made it easy for Andrea’s family to see their success. The first score is called the baseline, or the measure of the client system’s situation before planned change begins. In this case, Carmen determined the baseline to be -2, because the family didn’t have the tasks before planned change began. In other situations, the baseline may be measured several times to get a clearer picture of where the client system is in the process of change. For example, a worker may get a baseline of a behavior from the client’s file as it was collected during the initial meeting. Later, one or more baseline measures may take place before intervention on that particular goal is addressed.
Each time Carmen met with the family, they used the GAS to reflect on their progress. It was particularly challenging to get the forms to professionals and references. Using the GAS, Carmen was able to help them identify barriers and complete the objective. Back at the agency, Carmen’s supervisor was creating a GAS form for her staff. The agency mission was to facilitate permanent outcomes for children. Sometimes, families were reunited after a child spent a while in foster care and the goal was family permanency. Other times, family reunification wasn’t possible, and adoption became the goal for individual children. Either way, the agency was responsible to have a team of foster parents available at all times. That is, in order to respond to the goal of having foster families ready, the agency had the objective of recruiting new foster families. Carmen’s supervisor was continually facing a shortage of foster families, so she implemented some efforts for staff to carry out that might help. She wanted to keep a constant watch on their success in recruitment, and she wanted to motivate staff, so she decided to use the GAS and measure their success each month. We’ve talked about how the supervisory process and the planned change process are parallel. It was obvious in the GASthe line for “client” became “staff” and the line for “worker” became “supervisor.”
