Standardized instruments in social work practice

Discussion 1: Screening and Assessment Tools

What is important to know and when is it important to know it? To intervene in a problem, a social worker must first identify the problem. Screening and initial assessment can be useful to identity individuals who may be experiencing mental health concerns and could benefit from seeing a clinical social worker. This then would lead to a more comprehensive assessment from which a treatment plan is built. However, deciding who to assess, when, and using which tools can feel like a confusing process. For example, should you provide depression screenings in the community to people who are not clients? Should you screen all new clients for substance abuse regardless of presenting problem? Should you ask about suicide in every session or only when it feels like it could be a concern?

For this Discussion, review the following resources and consider the different screening and assessment tools currently available. Identify the tools you think you would be most likely to use in your practice.

American Psychiatric Association. (2018). Online assessment measures. Retrieved from https://www.psychiatry.org/psychiatrists/practice/dsm/educational-resources/assessment-measures#Disorder

Beidas, R. S., Stewart, R. E., Walsh, L., Lucas, S., Downey, M. M., Jackson, K., ... & Mandell, D. S. (2015). Free, brief, and validated: Standardized instruments for low-resource mental health settings. Cognitive and behavioral practice, 22(1), 5-19. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4310476/

SAMSHA. (n.d.) Screening tools. Retrieved from https://www.integration.samhsa.gov/clinical-practice/screening-tools

Post which screening and/or assessment tool(s) you would use in your practice. Explain why you identified the specific instrument(s) given the type of practice and client population with whom you would like to work. Explain how and when you would use the tool(s). Explain how you would use the information gathered from the tool in a session.

Support your posts with specific references to the Learning Resources. Be sure to provide full APA citations for your references. Should be at least 100 words and contain at 1 reference and 1 citation.

Discussion 2: Instruments Measuring Resiliency
Social workers strive to make informed decisions about the interventions they implement. These decisions should be driven by what the research data say. As a result, social workers have been called to systematically evaluate the effectiveness of the interventions they implement. A common way to evaluate interventions is to use a single-subject design. This involves monitoring an outcome for an intervention implemented for one client. After a social worker works with the client to determine the outcome to be measured, the following steps to the evaluation might look like this:

· Administer the instrument before the intervention is implemented

· Implement the intervention

· Administer the same instrument, after a specified time period

· Monitor to determine if there have been any changes in the outcome

In this Discussion, you use the lens of resiliency theory when reflecting on a case from your fieldwork, and then you consider how to measure the effectiveness of a possible intervention.

To prepare, read this article listed in the Learning Resources (in attachments):

· Smith-Osborne, A., & Whitehill Bolton K. (2013). Assessing resilience: A review of measures across the life course. Journal of Evidence-Based Social Work, 10(2), 111–126. doi:10.1080/15433714.2011.597305

Post:

· Reflect on a fieldwork experience, and identify a case where it would have been beneficial to employ resiliency theory. Describe the case in 2 sentences.

· Describe the presenting problem in one concise sentence.

· Describe an intervention you would implement to promote resiliency.

· Identify an instrument from the Smith-Osborne and Whitehill Bolton’s article that would be appropriate when employing a single-subject design to evaluate how effective the intervention is in increasing the client’s level of resiliency.

· Explain why you selected the instrument.

· In other words, why would the instrument be appropriate? (Consider the age of the client and for whom the instrument was designed, how feasible it would be to administer the instrument such as cost, time to administer it, etc.).

Support your posts with specific references to the Learning Resources. Be sure to provide full APA citations for your references. Should be at least 100 words and contain at 1 reference and 1 citation.