Social workers strive to make informed decisions about the interventions they implement. These decisions should be driven by what the research data say. As a result, social workers have been called to systematically evaluate the effectiveness of the interventions they implement. A common way to evaluate interventions is to use a single-subject design. This involves monitoring an outcome for an intervention implemented for one client. After a social worker works with the client to determine the outcome to be measured, the following steps to the evaluation might look like this:
- Administer the instrument before the intervention is implemented
- Implement the intervention
- Administer the same instrument, after a specified time period
- Monitor to determine if there have been any changes in the outcome
In this Discussion, you use the lens of resiliency theory when reflecting on a case from your fieldwork, and then you consider how to measure the effectiveness of a possible intervention.
To prepare, read this article listed in the Learning Resources:
- Smith-Osborne, A., & Whitehill Bolton K. (2013). Assessing resilience: A review of measures across the life course. Journal of Evidence-Based Social Work, 10(2), 111–126. doi:10.1080/15433714.2011.
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By Day 3
Post:
- Reflect on your fieldwork experience, and identify a case where it would have been beneficial to employ resiliency theory. Describe the case in 2 sentences.
- Describe the presenting problem in one concise sentence.
- Describe an intervention you would implement to promote resiliency.
- Identify an instrument from the Smith-Osborne and Whitehill Bolton’s article that would be appropriate when employing a single-subject design to evaluate how effective the intervention is in increasing the client’s level of resiliency.
- Explain why you selected the instrument.
- In other words, why would the instrument be appropriate? (Consider the age of the client and for whom the instrument was designed, how feasible it would be to administer the instrument such as cost, time to administer it, etc.).
By Day 5
Respond to two colleagues:
- Discuss how you would use the data collected by your colleague to guide the next step in the planned change process or to inform future work with clients.
Solution:
A case where it would be beneficial to apply resiliency theory is in a case of a 28-year-old healthcare worker who recently entered the field a few months after the outbreak of covid-19.
The presenting problem in this context is the psychological stress due to increased healthcare demand. The client is experiencing emotional distress due to increased workload as the covid-19 infections continue to rise, concern for her family, fear of contagion, job stress as well as personal isolation, especially from her family.
An intervention that I would use to promote resiliency in the above client is an educational session. The training program would be focused on fostering a culture that..To access the solution click the icon below to purchase at $5