Linking medicine and guidance in terms of impact
02-September-2004
permalink email thisThis is a contribution made by an participant in discussions during the development of the website
The challenges and complexities facing the guidance community in trying to measure and evaluate the effectiveness of guidance are not unique. Other disciplines involving human interaction, such as medicine and social welfare, face similar challenges and difficulties in evaluating the effectiveness of practice. For example, when a patient "gets better" following treatment, how do we know he/she wouldn't have recovered any way, by a process of self-healing; and if "getting better" really was linked to the intervention, how do we know that it was the direct effect of the treatment itself rather than the psychology of the placebo effect? Similarly, if an unemployed adult successfully returns to work following guidance, how do we know that this outcome would not have happened any way; how do we know that such an individual didn't already have a level of motivation that both inspired him/her to seek out support in the first place, and led the individual to proactively seek employment?
If the research complexities facing disciplines involved in human interaction are similar, then so too are many of the methodological solutions, or attempted solutions. For example, we know that a feature of much medical research, and of some guidance research, involves the use of an "experimental group" (patients/subjects/clients who get the drug/treatment/intervention) who are then compared with a "control group" (those who are similar to the experimental group in most respects except that they don`t get the drug/treatment/intervention). Unfortunately, for both disciplines there are often ethical and practical difficulties with the use of control and experimental groups. As a result, other techniques have to be used such as making comparisons between large-scale population samples, the so-called "control by calculation" technique. For example, it is tempting to speculate that the large scale collection of data relating to the outcomes of "enhanced services", recently implemented by the LSC, will be used in this way.
In order to explore the similarities between impact research within the medical and guidance fields, and to assess what, if anything, the guidance community can learn from this, the School of Health, Education and Science at Derby University has been approached to identify one of their colleagues to join us in our on-line discussions.
In the meantime though, do any of our guidance colleagues have any comments on what we might learn from other research disciplines? Are the comparisons valid and could they help us arrive at new and more effective impact methodologies, or at least a better understanding of the issues involved? Or could it be a bit of a wild goose chase, or a methodological cul de sac? What do you think?
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