Instruments Measuring Resiliency
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.
If you don’t have field experience that applies to this Discussion, you can apply other social work experience, including internships or professional experience, or apply a case study from this course.
Write a reponse to the following:
Reflect on your fieldwork or other professional 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.).
Write a conclusion paragraph in which you discuss how you would use the data collected to guide the next step in the planned change process or to inform future work with clients.
