How do young people, parents and social workers assess the quality of social work practice? A comparative judgement analysis of direct work with families

Welsh policy and guidance emphasises the role that social workers play in helping families, yet there has been surprisingly little Welsh research observing what happens when social workers meet parents. The studies that do exist are based on small samples using qualitative methods. This is perhaps understandable – social work takes place in private spaces and often involves sensitive and difficult conversations.

An important consequence of this gap is that while studies have interviewed parents and children about their experiences, there appear to be no studies in which those who use services have the opportunity to evaluate and give feedback on the nature and quality of practice with other families. This ground-breaking proposal involves applying a new method within children’s social care to give parents, young people and practitioners an opportunity to define what they see as good practice in meetings between social workers and parents.

The study involves recording at least 45 social work meetings with parents in three local authorities. The recordings will have all identifying details removed, and other steps including voice modulation will ensure anonymity. We will then undertake two types of analysis.

The first applies an existing coding scheme known as SWIM (Social Work and Interviewing Motivationally). SWIM has been used in studies with over 800 observations in England, where coding has been shown to be reliable and scores are correlated with outcomes for families.

The second method is called “comparative judgement”. It has been extensively used in the field of education but there appear to be no social work studies using this method. Comparative judgement is an ideal way of involving experts-by-experience in evaluating social work because it does not use a pre-agreed coding scheme. Instead, individuals listen to two recordings, deciding which is the better of the two and giving a short reason for the decision. As each recording is rated multiple times a highly reliable ranking of all recordings is produced, with qualitative information about why decisions were made. Doing so makes the implicit expertise of those making judgements explicit and shareable.

We will work with groups of 15-20 parents, care-experienced young people and practitioners to make these comparative judgements. 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.