Consider the various ways that the communities you are working with have been (mis)measured? How does measurement type influence the construction of social issues and the ways we address them? How might you measure things in an ethically responsive way?
Blog Post Rubric
Posts will be due by Friday of the same week they are assigned on Monday. You are expected to respond to your peers posts in a way that enhances our understanding of the subject. Please see the rubric below:
| Criteria | Full Participation Credit | Partial Credit |
|---|---|---|
| Blog Posts | Discussion prompts are answered fully and includes information from the readings, for example: 1. List 1-3 “social worker takeaways” you gained from the reading; or 2. Ask 2 questions you have connecting the reading to social work, or 3. List 1 interesting quote from the reading. | Discussion prompts are sparsely answered with no reference to the readings. |
| Engagement | Over the course of semester, the student has responded to at least 2 other student’s posts. The posts are related to the course texts and discussion content. | Over the course of the semester the student has responded to 1 or fewer student’s posts |
| Response Quality | The student’s responses thoughtfully build upon other’s perspectives and deepen the discussion. The responses include evidence from one of the below categories: 1. The readings 2. Social work practice (internship/work) 3. Professional and self-growth | The student’s responses do not thoughtfully build upon other’s perspectives, nor do they deepen the discussion. The responses do not include evidence from one of the below categories: 1. The readings 2. Social work practice (internship/work) 3. Professional and self-growth |
This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.
Social impact has been studied in domains such as education, health care, environmental sustainability, and poverty, which can be difficult to compare. As I read ” Scientific Inquiry in Social Work” I was taught Social workers engage in research to make sure their interventions are helping, not harming, clients and to contribute to social science as well as social justice. Although intuition and direct experience are powerful forces, it’s important to note intuitions are not always correct. For instance, imagine you are a clinical social worker at a Children’s Mental Health Agency. Today, you receive a referral from your town middle school about a client who often skips school, get into fights, and is disruptive in class. When you arrive at the school you notice he has difficulty maintaining eye contact with you, he is also a gifted artist. If he has a mental issue you might say ”give him therapy”. We could guess which intervention would be best but in practice that would be highly unethical. If we guessed wrong we could be harming a client. We need to ground our social work interventions with clients and systems with something more secure than our intuition and experience. Social worker needs to be able to understand and evaluate scientific information. Evidence – based practice for social workers involves on how to help clients based on the best available evidence. The case study shown above demonstrate the need for social workers to engage in evaluation research and in agency – based social work practice. Agencies, in a very important sense, helps us discover what approaches actually help clients.
Hey Jen!
I loved reading your post. I really agree with you that we need to not only use our intuition and experiences to help us make our decisions and interventions. At the end of the day, we want to do what is best for everyone else around us. Scientific data and information is a great way to back up what we propose as effective techniques and interventions for our clients. This very well goes in hand with what we discussed in class the other day, and how we can use data to effectively back up our ideas. This is very fitting for a research class but it also makes a lot of sense. It is important to use data in a way that is objective, understanding the difference between real peer-reviewed sources and “Fake news” or opinion pieces that may not be as strongly persuasive and as effective due to their biases.
I agree that it is difficult to compare social impact because it has been researched under different domains such as poverty, sustainability, education, climate change, and other issues affecting humankind. I support that social workers use well-established and reliable interventions to advance in their social work practice in terms of helping people recover easily from illnesses and have a high influence on social justice and social science. I would like to ask, how can social workers participate in agencies and evaluation research?
Hi, at Hunter college library I have read the following Social work practice evaluations also follow a process of inquiry that includes at least 1) defining the problem of client system; 2) defining the intervention(s) used; 3) collecting data about the intervention’s impact; 4) analysing data; and 5) concluding about the intervention and its benefit to the client system. Hopefully this answers your question
The community I work with are students with brain-based injuries and disorders. Often, these students are non-ambulatory, have cognitive delays, some are unable to use words to communicate, many are fed through a G-tube. Students with disabilities are often mismeasured within public schools and even in the external community. There are so many places that are not wheelchair accessible, and that do not have the resources to care for this population. They are often forgotten, neglected, and dismissed. It is extremely hurtful to see this and motivates me to ensure that they are taken into consideration in a more ethical way. It should be imperative for cities, schools, businesses, and institutions to be more considerate of those who are non-ambulatory and to be considerate of the limitations many children and adults have. I think society overall should be much more empathetic and less selfish and individualistic. We should think of the greater good more, and ways to be more inclusive, instead of focusing too much on data, statistics, revenue, and numbers. At the end of the day, we are people with feelings who want to feel accepted.
The research on social science typically relies on the effective use of measurement principles in communities because, without measurement science, we cannot develop evidence-based practice in social work. (Climino et al., 2020) Ideally, it is important to consider inadequate measurement of communities rather than insufficient concept and hypothesis because mismeasurement has plagued social researchers and undermined their ability to explain some of the variances confounded in society fully. I think that most of the social work advancements have been essentially limited by the existence of mismeasurements.
My experiences with measurement and mismeasurement can be weighed when I began working with different communities in social work projects such as home visitation programs, mental health awareness, and therapeutic assessments of patients. Notably, the communities I am working with have been mismeasured in vast ways, such that most participants in these social work programs have not made any crucial changes throughout the training and therapeutic assessment sessions (LeCroy, 2019). The other way communities have been mismeasured is by researchers using many inadequate and bad outcome indicators to evaluate social work interventions. The misuse of language in measurement can also be considered a way in which communities have been mismeasured. For instance, some programs that include evaluation of more than 1000 families and about 30 sites are primarily examined by researchers. They give their verdict that the study had no statistically crucial impact on the participants involved. Indeed, the misuse of language can be shown where researchers conclude that a program is ineffective without mentioning any measurements to explain why none of the outcomes illustrated an impact.
The measurement type influences the construction of social issues and how we address them by expressing a wide range of information in numbers, which are perceived to show trustworthiness and objectivity in the community. Ideally, when converting different concepts into numbers, it is important to consider expert interpretation because the fact is that we are dependent on vast measurement forms to obtain useful and credible information about the appropriate impact of an intervention (Bloom & Richard, 2019). I think that applying a type of measurement is the problem in these cases and not the measures initiated because people who develop social work instruments focus on predicting future events and actions rather than documenting change in society. The other way measurement type impacts the development of social issues is by involving a strong discourse that has many consequences for research on social work. Ideally, the subtext is that measurement makes us accept conclusions as to the basic truth regarding social work knowledge rather than enabling us to question the approaches used.
I might measure things ethically by using a scientific rating scale and socialworkmetric theory to improve the lives of different people, families, and groups in the community. A scientific rating scale will be important in the research when I intend to link both qualitative and quantitative measures with various components of a variant (Rubin et al., 2018). This might help collect a wide range of information that provides a clearer picture of the self-psychology aspects of research participants in the communities. The socialworkmetric theory might be used to measure change because it has both content and change validity and, it represents true findings of a measurement outcome.
Djenebou,
This is super comprehensive that clearly conveys a framework for analyzing the problem about mismeaurments , and offers clear solutions for said problem. Especially, When you state ” The misuse of language in measurement can also be considered a way in which communities have been mismeasured”, this is so important especially in survey research. Survey research tends to be a reliable method of inquiry. This is because surveys are standardized in that the same questions, phrased in exactly the same way, are posed to participants. But, This is not to say that all surveys are always reliable. A poorly phrased question can cause respondents to interpret its meaning differently, which can reduce that question’s reliability and mismeausure the community. Its always important to Be deliberate about how you present questions. and keep in mind the characteristics and need of people you will ask to complete your survey. (Scientific Inquiry in Social Work , MATTHEW DECARLO )
My references
References
LeCroy, C. W. (2019). Mismeasurement in social work practice: Building evidence-based practice one measure at a time. Journal of the Society for Social Work and Research, 10(3), 301-318.
Bloom, R. W. (2019). Psychology’s Mismeasurement Still Mismeasured.
Cimino, A. N., Killian, M. O., Von Ende, A. K., & Segal, E. A. (2020). Measurement Models in Social Work Research: A Data-Based Illustration of Four Confirmatory Factor Models and Their Conceptual Application. The British Journal of Social Work, 50(1), 282-301.
Rubin, M., Cohen Konrad, S., Nimmagadda, J., Scheyett, A., & Dunn, K. (2018). Social work and interprofessional education: Integration, intersectionality, and institutional leadership. Social Work Education, 37(1), 17-33.
In research, an AAPI Arab First Gen student, like me, is either mismeasured or not measured at all. Then even without notice, they slowly erase the check box that says Middle Eastern, but instead, you are told to check off the box that says white. We’ve managed to morph these two races, but if you put a white person and an Arab person next to each other, they will not be treated the same; we don’t experience the privilege of checking that box. The white person will have their box, but all Arabs get is a cage.
I refuse to check the box that erases my culture, my history. So I check “other,” and yet I still feel like I do not exist. I used to ask myself this question a lot, how long will my community and the needs of my community not matter? I feel the first step to measuring my community is to be loud! I was not quiet about it, I expressed it in my writing, and one day my AAPI professor took notice. She introduced me to a community where I can build something to support the needs of AAPI students, and finally include Arabs in the narrative. After Continuing to write and speak about the mis measurements in the AAPI/Arab community I was hired by the AANAPISI Bridge Initivative (ABI) at BMCC and Hunter College to support the needs of AAPI students in community colleges and expand the narrative of who AAPI students are. Most Arab Americans do not know they are Asian American too and forced to check the white box, this neglects the financial needs in Arab communities because we are grouped with a privileged community. One of my goals in this position is to help them see they can also identify as Asian American and provide them the financial resources they need to succeed in college.
This is one way I can support my community and ethically measure them, by expanding the AAPI (Asian American Pacific Islander ) narrative in higher education. AAPI students from low-income and/or immigrant households have stated a particular need for financial literacy and balancing employment or family commitments. This was our starting point and inspired a workshop that discussed applying for credit cards, understanding interest rates, APR, and building credit score. Also, how credit cards opens up the conversation about how policies and institutions perpetuate financial and social inequity. That is as important to understand as the info and skills we provide in our workshops. With this information, I can also conduct need assessments that incorporate communities that other assessments foget.
My population I work with at my agency are people with Serious Mental Illness (SMI). Individuals with SMI have historically been mis-measured like many other individuals with mental and physical disabilities. Like these other disabilities, individuals with SMIs have been thought of as needing a cure to “fix” them of their ‘illness.’ Considering a disability justice perspective, society at large creates extra barriers for people with SMIs and attaches stigma to the experience of mental illness. An example of a mis-measurement would be how psychiatrists decide what an individual is diagnosed as, being billed for the medications they prescribe, and historical language that is derogatory such as “insane.”
This mis-measurement has jarring consequences. Historically, the asylum has been a space of confinement, punitive action, and experimentation. More currently, adult homes— in which many people with SMIs have been placed—, are spaces of abuse and neglect. In general, many folks with SMIs are ignored for their real concerns and needs. Another personal upsetting fact to me is the way in which LGBT+ folks historically have been considered mentally ill because of their queerness. Even now, the most current DSM contains “gender identity disorder” as a genuine disorder rather than a symptom of transphobia. Psychiatry is still more interested in containing and ignoring individuals with SMIs than actually providing support and protection.
Like other communities, people with SMIs should lead the research on SMIs. This research should be done with the perspective of liberation and well-being, rather than curing.
The communities I am working with have been mismeasured through the use of convenience and voluntary response sampling. There have been occasions where the social worker targeted people who were easy to reach, thereby selecting a sample that was easily available. This led to mismeasurement since the social worker obtained biased results. There have also been instances where the social worker invited individuals within the community to participate and then obtained results from those who accepted the invites. The results obtained were most likely skewed since the population that participated might have had a strong opinion compared to the rest of the population within the community.
It is important for a social worker to ensure that they employ the right measurement method since it greatly determines the results obtained. Acquiring reliable results means that the social worker gets accurate information about the issues affecting the community and can address them appropriately. For instance, since the community I am currently working with is children involved in the juvenile system and their families, I should ensure that my measurement method focuses on the affected children and their families. This way, I will be able to get results that explain the current social issue and methods of combating the problem.
I might measure things in an ethically responsive way by applying stratified random sampling. This involves dividing the population I am supposed to measure into categories then choosing a representative from each category. For instance, I can divide the kids who have been involved in the juvenile system into three categories by age, then choose one child from each category. I can also choose one family member from each family affected by the juvenile system. This type of measurement is ethical since all the groups will be represented and the data obtained will be fair and accurate. It will also help to find the best possible solution to the issue affecting the community.
Hello Linden,
Thank you so much for sharing this. I strongly agree with you. It is very important that social workers make sure to follow all the important steps adequately so that we do the right measurements in order to obtain real results. Doing this, we will be able to identify all the issues we should be addressing, and in that way, we don’t left out anyone. I loved the example that you gave about applying stratified random sampling by dividing the population so that we make sure we are including everyone. This was really awesome! I loved reading some of the implementations you would make as a social worker.
I work at a high school with immigrant students, and as we know, immigrants have been mismeasured in many ways, however, I would like to emphasize how they are counted for in the last 3 years. Around 3 years ago, there was a major change for the immigrant community, and I am very happy to see how immigrants are being counted in the United States, especially students. Undocumented students were lacking on financial aid resources and could not receive any federal grants and they could only apply to scholarships that sometimes can be really hard to get because of the amount of students that apply for it. But now, undocumented students can apply for a grant called “The Senator José Peralta New York States DREAM ACT”. This gives them the opportunity to have access to New York State grants and scholarships where they can apply and receive financial aid that will cover their college tuition. The same year when this was granted, this was the same time when undocumented students could also start obtaining their New York drivers license. This made me extremely happy because since I work with immigrant and undocumented high school students, I’ve seen the issues they go through not having access to certain resources and being mismeasured. As I would like to continue working with the immigrant population, I will keep in mind and keep doing more research as to how immigrant students are not being measured because I would like to find ways in which I can be supportive and start making changes as a social worker, even if we start on the micro levels, but it’s always good to know in which ways our community and population is being mismeasured, so that we continue supporting them until there are huge changes like the Dream Act grant for undocumented students.