Evaluating social work clinical practice in the real world

Abstract

Roughly speaking there are at least 1.5 million and possibly over 2 million social workers in the world, many of whom work with individuals. This article focuses on one type of evaluation of social work practice, the evaluation of the outcome of help seeking for personal problems that is called clinical practice usually provided by social work case managers and therapists. The article primarily discusses Feedback Informed Treatment (FIT) developed in the early 2000s. It is a formal structured approach utilizing two validated very brief measures employed during every client session that can be graphed and is designed to evaluate the client’s wellbeing and the worker’s intervention throughout the course of treatment. The article argues that this is the best way for social workers to assess whether or not the client is benefitting from their work as well as evaluating the approach of the helping professional even though this well studied and effective approach is almost nonexistent in social work either in Europe or the United States. We also discuss single subject design that is the mainstay of social work evaluation of clinical practice courses taught for decades even though it is almost never used in actual practice.