How Well do we Know Consumer Strengths?
Or: Social Work Assessment Meets Godzilla
Revised from The Roundtable, vol. 1, no. 2, (November 1998), p. 16-17

By Tom Lengyel
director of research and evaluation services

How well do social workers and clinicians know consumer strengths, as distinct from their deficits?

Here are several findings from a new analysis of data from last year’s National Survey of the American Family. It shows that social workers have considerable room to grow in knowing which social relationships their consumers used in coping with daily life, and in knowing which relationships proved most helpful. In fact, the accuracy of social service providers was just slightly better than chance on these two measures. The good news is that accuracy was better with groups of people who appear to have the greatest need, such as those with basic needs issues, and welfare recipients. The finer details of differential accuracy also reveal that social work assessment continues to focus on the immediate family, neglecting other informal, neighborhood resources as potential sources of support.

Assets: people, groups, and resources that often are helpful to members of a family in reaching goals, getting things done, or meeting needs

Two Types of Social Work Accuracy
For use of a resource, knowledge was accurate when the consumer and the provider agreed the consumer used the resource, or when they agreed the consumer did not use the resource. The calculation of helpfulness was based only on that subset of resources that the person used. For helpfulness, a match occurred when the consumer rated a particular resource as very helpful and the social worker’s answer agreed. The chances of a correct guess were one out of two for use, and one out of three for helpfulness.

Use Accuracy
Service providers were correct as to use of social resources 60.6 percent of the time. This is slightly better than guessing, and can be compared to a score of 61 on a 100-item true-false test. The result suggests that most social workers do not invest in uncovering and documenting consumer strengths.

Focusing on the top 10 most used consumer assets, use accuracy was highest for the consumer’s immediate family relationships and for the resource labeled "counselor." Accuracy dropped off sharply for other commonly used assets such as doctor, social service providers, and neighbors.

Turning to the list of the top 10 most helpful resources, use accuracy was high only for the resources "parents" and "counselor." The eight remaining resources had use accuracies clustering around the national average of 61 percent. In other words, service providers had better knowledge of family assets compared to the other resource groupings. They were relatively poor at identifying community-based assets.

Helpfulness Accuracy
With respect to knowing the consumer’s most helpful resources, social workers were correct 45.7 percent of the time, or about 12 percent better than chance. This can be compared to a score of 46 on a 100-item multiple choice test, in which each question listed three choices.

The Influence of Consumer Characteristics on Accuracy
Social workers were also asked if they had better knowledge of certain types of consumers. Use accuracy was highest (66.3 percent) with consumers who had basic needs issues, such as housing, unemployment, and inadequate income. It was generally lower for those who sought help for family problems, such as parent-child relationships (62.1 percent). Use accuracy was significantly better for African-Americans (68.2 percent) than it was for Caucasians (60.8 percent) or Latino-Hispanic consumers (57.6 percent). Social workers were also significantly more knowledgeable about the assets of welfare recipients (65.2 percent) than about those consumers who reported no contact with the welfare system (60.2 percent).