Lisa Wallander

Measuring Social Workers’ Judgements: Why and How to use the Factorial Survey Approach in the Study of Professional Judgements

• Summary: The factorial survey approach, which was first introduced in the social sciences around the beginning of the 1980s, constitutes an advanced method for measuring human judgements of people or social situations. At the general level, this quasi-experimental approach involves presenting respondents with vignettes (fictive descriptions), in which selected characteristics describing the vignette ‘person’ or ‘situation’ are simultaneously manipulated. The aim of this article is to present a conceptual and an analytical framework for factorial survey studies of professional judgements in social work. • Findings: In the first part of the article, I develop and discuss the proposition that this approach may be used in order to study the contents of professional judgements about the diagnosis and treatment of clients. The ‘contents’ is discussed in terms of knowledge assumptions that practitioners explicitly and tacitly use as a basis for their professional judgements. Second, I outline a strategy for modelling social workers’ judgements. This modelling strategy proceeds from the possibilities afforded by multilevel regression analysis. • Applications: Findings from analyses of factorial survey data may reveal both professional agreement and disagreement in practitioners’ judgements. While results that reveal high levels of disagreement in judgements about what constitutes a particular diagnosis or about which intervention is the most suitable for a particular client may raise questions as regards the ‘professionalism’ of practitioners’ judgements, results that reveal professional agreement in diagnostic and treatment assumptions may be transformed into hypotheses that can be tested further in research.

Disentangling practitioners’ perceptions of substance use severity: A factorial survey

The aim of this study was to examine the influence of user, staff and work unit characteristics on addiction care practitioners’ assessments of the severity of alcohol and drug use. A factorial survey was conducted among 489 social workers, therapists, nurses, doctors and executives from 77 addiction care units in the three largest Swedish counties. Staff assessed the severity of 10 fictive scenarios, vignettes (n = 4724), describing persons with varying social characteristics who were users of alcohol, cannabis or cocaine. The effects of user, respondent and work-unit variables on the practitioners’ severity assessments were estimated using multilevel regression analysis. The results show that perceived severity was influenced not only by the substance, the frequency and character of the negative consequences of the use, but also by the age, socio-economic status and family situation of the user. Women, older respondents and respondents with a medical education rather than a social work education were on average more inclined to assess the vignettes as being more severe. Analyses of various interactions revealed that practitioners viewed the drinking of young men as being less severe than that of young women. Doctors saw womens use as more problematic than mens, irrespective of the context. To conclude, alcohol and drug consumption is judged by different norms, depending on various characteristics of the users, of the practitioners and also of their workplaces. To avoid potential negative consequences of the application of such varying standards in addiction care, more individual reflection and workgroup discussion are needed.

Perceptions of treatment needs – A factorial survey of Swedish addiction care practitioners

Abstract The aim of the study was to analyze addiction care staff (N = 447) perceptions of needs for psychosocial and medical treatment, and possibilities for self-change in relation to fictitious cases. By means of a factorial survey and multilevel analysis, the importance of user, respondent and work characteristics were estimated, with a particular focus on the comparison between healthcare staff and social services staff. Healthcare staff were more skeptical than social services staff towards self-change and assessed the need for medical treatment to be greater. Despite the ongoing medicalisation of Swedish addiction care, psychosocial interventions were still seen as a central part of treatment by both groups. The importance of user characteristics for the assessments was surprisingly similar across the two groups of staff, suggesting that staff perceptions are analogous to the governing images of substance use and treatment needs that prevail in society.

Learning to reason: the factorial survey as a teaching tool in social work education

Abstract This article proceeds from the notion that the ability to reason well – i.e. to try to find justified answers to questions such as ‘what is the case?’ and ‘what ought to be done?’ – constitutes an essential professional skill, which can be acquired and advanced in professional education. Accordingly, drawing on the much-used argument model developed by the philosopher Stephen Toulmin, we present a conceptual model for professional reasoning and propose an innovative tool for exercising reasoning in professional education. The tool involves the sociologist Peter Rossi’s factorial survey method, which is based on the use of experimentally constructed fictive descriptions (vignettes). By having students make judgements of a large number of short vignettes (N = 96) and conducting statistical analyses separately for each individual, we construct judgement profiles displaying the causal predictors of each student’s judgements. These profiles are subsequently employed in reflective discussions and for constructing arguments in accordance with the Toulmin model. By focussing in detail on the structure and contents of the arguments underlying each student’s judgements, this teaching tool provides a number of advantages. For example, it can be used for making arguments relying on less reliable knowledge sources more transparent and thus open to scrutiny. Further, due to its experimental features, the tool makes it possible to analyse results of both reflective and intuitive thinking. Furthermore, it offers a way of encouraging the students to deal in an analytic and deliberate manner with the potential cognitive errors resulting from intuitive thinking, such as stereotyping.