Evaluate Practice with Individuals, Families, Groups, Organizations, and Communities

Evaluation is recognized by social workers as an ongoing process when working with diverse individuals, families, groups, organizations, and communities. The importance of evaluation is understood by social workers to help increase more efficient outcomes, practice, and delivery of services. Theories of human behavior and the social environment are used to evaluate practice and outcomes. When it comes to evaluation outcomes and practice effectiveness, social workers understand the importance of qualitative and quantitative methods.

• select and use appropriate methods for evaluation of outcomes;
• apply knowledge of human behavior and the social environment, person-in-environment, and other multidisciplinary theoretical frameworks in the evaluation of outcomes;
• critically analyze, monitor, and evaluate intervention and program processes and outcomes; and
• apply evaluation findings to improve practice effectiveness at the micro, mezzo, and macro levels.

Field Evidence:

Evaluation has been used constantly throughout my practice as a future social worker. During individual assessments, I would ask my resident how this session went and what I could improve on for our next one. While facilitating group sessions, the other intern and I took an evaluation midway through the semester and decided that groups would be terminated based on the resident’s responses. I also was able to evaluate the results from the survey I created and emailed the results to my supervisor.

Academic Evidence:

Through my classes in the social work department, I had multiple avenues of evaluation. I had the opportunity to work with a group to perform an evaluation of a local company in the Chattanooga area and how they were structured and operated. We then presented this to our social work cohort. After completing five group sessions with seventh graders at a local school, I was able to evaluate our process and progress and present the results to my social work class.