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Studying the Effectiveness of Interventions to Improve Decision Making and Work with Risk
Book chapter

Studying the Effectiveness of Interventions to Improve Decision Making and Work with Risk

Joanne Hilder and Andrew Whittaker
The SAGE Handbook of Decision Making, Assessment and Risk in Social Work, pp.569-578
SAGE Publications Ltd
2023
DOI: https://doi.org/10.4135/9781529614657.n71

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Abstract

Every day, social work practitioners manage risk and make decisions which can have significant consequences for the individuals, families and communities that they work with (Whittaker & Taylor, 2017). These important decisions are often made in environments where there are time and resource pressures (Taylor & Whittaker, 2018). Given these challenges and the importance of social work decision making, researchers, organisations and practitioners have been working to improve social work decision making and the management of risk. Through this combined effort, new interventions have been, and will continue to be, developed. It is vital that these new interventions are empirically evaluated so that the sector can understand what interventions work and should be implemented into practice. This chapter outlines the types of research designs that can be used to empirically evaluate interventions that are designed to improve social work decision making and the management of risk. This chapter is divided into three parts. The first part addresses the question ‘what is effective decision making?’ Here, we outline Hood et al.'s (2021) five definitions of effective decision making and establish the ways in which improvements in social work assessment, decision making and management of risk can be measured. The second part of the chapter presents an in-depth analysis of experimental and quasi-experimental research designs and defines key concepts, presents examples and suggests helpful resources. The final part of the chapter outlines some of the important methodological and ethical issues relevant to social workers using experimental and quasi-experimental research designs. This chapter at the end of Section Four focuses on research methods most relevant to studying improvement or change in decision making, risk management or assessment practices. The chapter complements the discussion of methodologies elsewhere in this handbook, including: - methods to study professional judgement, such as vignette, think-aloud and input–process–output methodologies (Chapter 12 at the end of Section One); - qualitative, survey and ‘mixed methods’ to study processes of assessment, decision making and risk communication (Chapter 25 at the end of Section Two); and - epidemiological methods using population-level data for population modelling and understanding risk at societal level (Chapter 36 at the end of Section Three).

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