Pauline Hardiker

Evaluating for good practice

Evaluation in Practice: Our Approach - The Purposes of Evaluation - Facts, Truths and Values - Measuring Performance - Towards a Critical Approach to Evaluation - Designs for Critical Evaluation - Generating Evidence about Practice - Making Judgements and Effecting Change - Conclusion - Annotated Bibliography - Bibliography

Applied Research for Better Practice

Research and Practice - Epistemology and Theory in Social Work - Purposes and Values of Research - A Methodology for the Research-Minded Practitioners - Formulating the Issues in Research-Minded Practice - Engaging with Subjects to Generate Data - Analysing the Data of Practice - The Practitioner-Evaluator - Conclusion

Towards a Critical Approach to Evaluation

So far we have focused our writing on rational-technical approaches to evaluation because, to a significant extent, they have become synonymous with evaluation. Also, in our experience, it is these forms of evaluation that most alienate practitioners and encourage (rightly in our view) suspicion about the values and purposes of evaluation.

Coping with Home Dialysis

This paper describes and discusses the results of an exploratory and smallscale study of 20 renal patients treated by dialysis at home. The conceptual framework explored tasks and coping alongside the uncertainty, powerlessness, and scarcity experienced by people undergoing home dialysis. The range of coping strategies, styles of coping, and illness role which were adopted by the respondents, and the implications of these are examined in relation to theories of coping, defending, and adaptation.

The Purposes of Evaluation

In the introductory chapter we revealed the context of the changing political economy of social welfare in which evaluation has become a significant managerialist strategy for efficiency and control. As House remarks about Britain in his appraisal of evaluation in advanced capitalist societies: The government has tried to install a culture of management modelled on the corporate sector in order to curtail the spending of local governments and the demands of professionals and unions. Professional authority is subsumed under managerial authority. Managerial evaluation, focused on efficiency and productivity under direct government control, has been attempted in many departments. (House, 1993: x)

Analysing the Data of Practice

Practitioners are engaged in the process of data analysis all of the time. They interpret and assign meaning to all kinds of data from a wide range of sources: what they read, what they see, what they hear, what they are told, what they themselves think and feel. In this chapter we explore ways in which practitioners may become more aware, more explicit and more rigorous about these processes.

Evaluation in Practice: Our Approach

Increasing attention is being paid to evaluation in the personal social services and in social welfare more broadly. The 1980s and 1990s have witnessed new languages and approaches to social welfare. Citizenship, citizen charters and consumerism; inspection and complaints procedures, and quality control requirements of the 1989 Children Act, the 1990 National Health Service and Community Care Act and the Criminal Justice Acts; total quality management; value for money; performance measurement and performance indicators; the need for public services, including voluntary projects, to be publicly accountable for economy, efficiency and effectiveness; all these developments have had the effect of placing evaluation near to the top of the agenda in many social welfare organisations.

Designs for Critical Evaluation

In this chapter, we draw upon the work of two post-modernist writers to outline frameworks that may be useful in designing that part of evaluation which is to do with generating evidence. The first, Layder (1993), sets out a research map. This clarifies different, but interrelated, levels of social life which impinge on, and are constructed through, activities, or practice. Second, Fraser’s analysis of need (1989) illustrates ways in which discourses may be analysed. In the next chapter, using the postmodernist work of Fox (1993), we explore ways in which alternative discourses may be fostered. He provides ideas for alternative ways of approaching the eliciting of, and meaning of, user views. We illustrate the chapter with examples drawn from our own attempts to evaluate for ‘good’ practice.

Making Judgements and Effecting Change

In the end evaluation involves making judgements about value and effecting change in the direction of the ‘good’. It is these two central features that distinguish evaluation from research. In this chapter we look at ways in which the evidence of practice generated for the evaluation may be analysed and used to inform the making of judgements about whether the practice is ‘good’, ‘good enough’, ‘poor’ or ‘corrupt’. We also reflect upon ways in which evaluation may be used to facilitate changes in practice and policies in the direction of the ‘good’.

Generating Evidence About Practice

Having developed possible frameworks for evaluation designs, in this chapter we focus upon developing evaluation methods. In particular, we intend to explore ways to undertake evaluations that are critical and informed with understandings of power and powerlessness. We consider ways in which to generate evidence about the practice being evaluated. We then proceed, in the following chapter, to look at ways in which such evidence may be analysed and used to inform the making of judgements about whether the practice is ‘good’, ‘good enough’, ‘poor’ or ‘corrupt’.