Assessment in Social Work

Judith Milner, Steve Myers, Patrick O'Byrne

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781352009415
• eBook ISBN: 9781350313194
• Edition: 5
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Sozialarbeit

Assessment is a core component of social work. Since first publication, Assessment in Social Work has provided students and practitioners with a clear overview of the complex issues they face and a map of the theory they need to draw on in order to conduct thorough, effective and meaningful assessments. New to this Edition:
- Updated and revised chapter on Signs of Safety/Strengths in light of recent research and guidance
- Coverage of recording and sharing information included throughout the text
- Added coverage of confidentiality and inter-agency workingUpdated material in light of the Mental Capacity Act
- More material on Cultural differences throughout
- Updated legislation and professional guidance throughout Refreshed and updated examples thought-out the text
- A more detailed outline of the different national perspectives within the UK

1	ASSESSMENT IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

What this chapter is about

In this chapter, we look at the difficulty of defining assessment. How theory and research influence social workers’ hypotheses about the focus of assessment is then addressed, as is the impact of legislation and government guidance in recent years and the complexities arising from the emphasis on managing risk.

Main points

• Definitions of assessment.

• How hypotheses are formed and checked.

• The changing legal context and its impact.

• Evidence-based effective practice.

• Handling information overload.

Defining assessment

Although Crisp et al. (2005) found that there was no universally agreed definition in social work, most textbooks on assessment offer some definition related to one or more of the five stages of assessment proposed by us (Milner et al., 2015). Coulshed and Orme (2012) said it was an ongoing process in which the service user participates, the purpose of which is to understand people in relation to their environment; it is the basis for planning what needs to be done to maintain, improve and bring about change. Dyke (2016) said it is a process of professional judgement or appraisal of the situation, circumstances and behaviour of the service user and it might involve risk assessment, whereas Griggs (2000) said it is about ascertaining need.

More comprehensively, Smale et al. (1993) held that realistic assessment has to address the whole of the task, engage in ongoing negotiations with the full range of people involved in the situation and their possible solutions and address the change, care and social control tasks so as to go beyond the individualization of social problems as the focus for assessment and intervention. Compton and Galloway (1999) described assessment as the collection and processing of data to provide information for use in making decisions about the nature of a problem and what is to be done about it. It is a cognitive process: it involves thinking about the data, and the outcome is a service plan which provides a definition of the problem for work objectives or solutions to be achieved, and an action plan to accomplish the objectives. For Hepworth et al. (2002), assessment is a fluid, dynamic process of receiving, analyzing and synthesizing new information as it emerges through the entire course of a given case. Mainstone (2014) makes the point that meeting the needs of each family member and protecting the vulnerable from harm often mean that several different assessments have to be brought together before a holistic understanding can be reached. Furthermore, sometimes specialist assessments offer new insights or difficult, contradictory information.

The Working Together to Safeguard Children guidance (DfE, 2018) states that, whatever the legislation the assessment is being made within, the purpose is to gather important information about a child and family; to analyze their needs and/or the nature and level of any risk and harm being suffered by the child; to decide whether the child is a child in need (section 17) and/or is suffering or likely to suffer significant harm (section 47); and to provide support to address those needs to improve the child’s outcomes to make them safe. Additionally, and echoing Hepworth et al. (2002), the guidance recommends that the assessment should be ‘a dynamic process, which analyzes and responds to the changing nature and level of need and/or risk faced by the child’ (p. 25). We look at this in more detail in Chapter 10.

Our definition

Assessment in social work is a five-stage process of exploring a situation by:

1. Preparing for the task.

2. Collecting data, including perceptions of the service user, the family and other agencies of the problem and any attempted solutions.

3. Applying professional knowledge (practice wisdom as well as theory) to seek analysis, understanding or interpretation of the data.

4. Making judgements about the relationships, needs, risks, standard of care or safety, seriousness of the situation, and people’s capacities and potential for coping or for change (is the progress good enough?).

5. Deciding and/or recommending what is to be done, plus how, by whom and when, and how progress will be reviewed.

In this definition, analysis is about making sense of events and statements, arriving at an overall picture and an understanding of what is happening, and perhaps giving some thought as to how the situation has come about, using one or more of the theoretic ‘maps’ (Chapters 5–9). Judgement is about what is good enough and what is not, what is dangerous and what is reasonably safe, what is of a reasonable standard and what is not. Decision-making is about future action or inaction and aspects of that action, with a plan for carrying it out and reviewing it. Described thus, it seems almost simple, but of course it is anything but in most cases. Even the question of what data to collect, what is relevant, what is enough, and so on, makes the very start of the process difficult and many of the frameworks that have been written are little more than checklists to ensure nothing relevant is forgotten in stages 1 and 2 of work with particular service user groups. Where it is needed most – in stages 3, 4 and 5 – there is less guidance. We will return to examining frameworks in Chapter 3; first we consider some of the debates over what knowledge informs the process.

How working hypotheses are developed

Traditionally, social work texts have expressed agreement that assessment is a key element in social work practice, in that without it workers would be left to react to events and intervene in an unplanned way (see, for example, Coulshed et al., 2006). Having agreed on the centrality of assessment in the social work process, some texts have then dismissed the subject in a few pages. Apart from giving some brief homilies on counter-checking facts and hypotheses and the necessity of reassessing wherever appropriate, most writers made a list of information-yielding sources and then departed from the subject to other aspects of the social work process. Exceptions include Middleton (1997), Clifford (1998), Parsloe (1999), Holland (2010) and Mainstone (2014), who have written books specifically on assessment.

However, gathering information, sifting it carefully and coming to an ‘objective’ and ‘accurate’ conclusion are by no means as unproblematic as this implies; assessment has never been the scientific, easy-to-learn activity that many writers pretended. For example, Coulshed and Orme (2012) compared assessment with a social study that avoids labels and is reached as a result of logical analysis of data which has been collected carefully and systematically. They implied that editing needed to be done but made no suggestion as to how this skill could be acquired, although editing shapes the way information is collected and selected for the initial assessment (Sheldon, 1995), and later information is processed selectively and discretely if it fails to confirm the initial hypothesis (Reder et al., 1993; Milner, 2008b).

THEORY INTO PRACTICE

Mohammed and Tracy’s children were removed from their care following discovery that Mohammed was violent towards Tracy, that their home lacked some basic amenities, and that they regularly entertained large numbers of young people who were known to misuse substances. Mohammed and Tracy obtained the tenancy of a more suitable house in a nearby town, the address of which they kept from their previous acquaintances. They were angry and upset throughout the subsequent child protection assessment process, being particularly aggrieved at what they perceived as a lack of acknowledgement of their efforts to meet the concerns which had led to the removal of their children. After Mohammed beat Tracy again, she ejected him from the house and was hopeful that she would regain the care of her children. She found the questions asked as part of the continuing assessment offensively intrusive and tended to respond in either an angry or a tearful manner. The social worker accepted that Tracy had done everything demanded of her but continued with care proceedings on the grounds that Tracy’s ‘hostility’ would make it impossible for her to work with Social Care if the children were returned on a supervision order.

■ How could the information collected by the social worker have been interpreted differently?

Viewing assessment as unproblematic and unbiased in itself creates a gap between theories of problem causation and intervention, a gap in which the service user is often squeezed to fit the social worker’s ideas about the nature of people and how best their problems could be addressed. This has been recognized for some time in social work practice. Denney (1992), for example, found in his study of probation reports that many of the assessments seemed to contradict the form of work being advocated. The most commonly used interventions were largely individual rather than social, although there have been some protests:

If we are to maintain the integrity of ‘community’ care, ‘social’ service and ‘social’ work, we have to confront the constant tendency that we all have to regress to the individualization of people’s problems. (Smale and Tuson, 1993, p. 30)

Similarly, Barber (1991) expressed dismay at the tendency towards ‘reductionism’ in which social work became equated with casework and individual solutions were found within the psychopathology of individuals and their interpersonal relations. Harrison (1995) refers to this as the ‘forensic gaze’, suggesting that it gives rise to ‘placebo solutions’. He illustrates his point with the example of a refugee mother of five children.

Mrs. Rusha lost half her family, struggled through a civil war, fought her way to England, studied in the evenings for a decent job and then popped out to the shop, leaving a 10-year-old in charge of the family. She was then ‘threatened’ with parenting skills training.

This was a solution firmly embedded in a belief that family pathology is the key to much abuse and neglect rather than one, minority, analysis of the context of abuse. Why the preoccupation with individual casework? Scourfield (2003) makes an important point about the impact of theory and research on the development of working hypotheses: ‘[S]ocial workers take up selected and condensed messages from this literature, which are passed on to colleagues through occupational cultures’ (p. 111, our emphasis). For example, he found that the persistence of psychodynamic ideas about the emotional well-being of children in social work practice meant that social workers dig for sexual abuse as an explanation of current family dysfunction: ‘[I]t seems that social workers want to get beyond the surface of observable family situations to find unpleasant secrets rather than locate causes of problems that can lead to helping strategies’ (Scourfield, 2003, p. 127). ‘Digging’ for secrets not only is subjective data collection but also is deeply resented by service users:

They failed me with my sexual abuse. My social worker never even turned up for the court case, even though she promised. I took an overdose after the court case and then she turned up … before, she was just digging, thinking it was something else, like a probem at home. (Milner, 2004)

It also skews the assessment, leading to inappropriate interventions being prescribed. The Criminal Justice Joint Inspection of responses to children and young people who sexually offend Criminal Justice Board (2013) found that ‘most of the work to address offending behaviour was not delivered as identified in various plans, an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Titlepage
• Titlepage
• Copyright
• Short Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Assessment in the Twenty-First Century
• 2 Anti-oppressive Practice
• 3 Effective Assessment Processes
• 4 Selecting a Map
• 5 A Satellite Map: Systems Approaches
• 6 A Map of the Ocean: Psychodynamic Approaches
• 7 An Ordnance Survey Map: Behavioural Approaches
• 8 A Handy Tourist Map: The Task-Centred Approach
• 9 An Explorer Map: Strengths-based Approaches
• 10 Assessment in Children’s Services
• 11 Assessment in Adults’ Services
• 12 A Map of the Universe: Spiritual Approaches
• Conclusion
• References
• Index