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26 September
No 1222
Partners in Assessment
In any assessment youth will only cooperate when they have a positive response to the adult seeking information. This article describes the components of a gender-sensitive needs assessment guide developed for youth worIkers to use in collaboration with youth. Young persons are seen as the best experts on their own lives.
Conversations with youth workers provided the impetus for a team of researchers at the University of Victoria to develop a needs assessment guide for youth. Funding was applied for and received to develop a gender-sensitive tool to meet the needs of at-risk girls and young women through the National Crime Prevention Centre, Department of Justice Canada. The tool development project was designed to engage in a collaborative process with youth and workers that spanned three phases: information gathering, tool development, and tool-pilot testing (with revisions). Throughout the information gathering and tool development stages, focus groups and individual interviews with workers and youth highlighted the critical importance of the youth worker relationship. The importance of the youth worker relationship has also been stressed by Clark (2001) who, in his research on 40 years of psychotherapy outcome studies, found that client capability, the relationship between client and worker, and hope and expectancy account for much of behaviour change, while technique accounts for only 15%.
Youth told us repeatedly that they do not cooperate with workers with whom they have no established connections or with assessments that they believe are disrespectful and intrusive – that is, assessments that ask them to answer what youth described as “irrelevant and demeaning†questions about their personal lives, relationships, and activities. Clark (2001) states that it is the youth’s assessment of her/his relationhip with the worker that matters. If a young person doesn’t feel positive about and involved in the relationship with the worker, the relationship doesn’t really exist, regardless of how it may be defined by the worker.
Clark (2001) also comments on the reason why diagnoses of problems based on impersonal assessments don’t work: Youth are active and generative, the severity, magnitude and frequency of problems are constantly changing, and change itself is a powerful client factor. Thus, as he points out, we do youth a profound disservice if we take an approach that represents their problems as static and constant, that is, as captured in diagnostic labels, because this implies that a youth’s presenting problems have a quality of permanence that is contradictory to the notion of change. Clark states that worker “expertise continues to be vital and required but only to guide and raise the three critical ingredients – the tactical triad – of a youth’s resources, perceptions and participation†(p. 26). These critical ingredients should, therefore, be a part of any assessment and are, for that reason, included here. Young people and workers should not focus on “what is wrong and what a person cannot do,†but instead on what a young person can already do and has already done in his or her life, what she or he thinks, and what she or he is willing to try.
SIBYLLE ARTZ, DIANA NICHOLSON, ELAINE HALSALL, SUSAN LARKE
Artz, S., Nicholdon, D., Halsall, E. and Lake, S. Partners in Assessment. Reclaiming Children and Youth,12, 4. Winter 2004.
REFERENCE
Clark, M. (2001). Influencing positive behavior change:
Increasing the therapeutic approach of juvenile courts. Federal
Probation, 65(1), 18-28.
