My Client

I have decided to evaluate the group of adolescent girls which I teach art to on Sundays for my agency. This is the second art group for adolescent girls that my agency sponsors; it was created due to my suggestion which was to maximize the amount of children we can help and save money at the same time. The six girls that attend the class are between the ages of 11-14, they all come from dysfunctional homes with a myriad of financial and emotional problems. I know very little about their home life, I have deliberately decided not to know in order to give them a chance to make this social encounter as close to what would happen in the real world as possible. In this way I can get a baseline that reflects their natural behavior patterns. I want them to disclose as much as they would to anyone else without me prompting them based on prior knowledge. I have not told the girls that they are being evaluated since they and their families are skittish when it comes to therapy. By couching the socialization in an art group it has allowed us to give many young women the opportunity to feel normal and interact with their peers in a non-threatening environment that is supportive. Another reason for not telling the girls or their parents we are evaluating the group is because two months ago we wanted to give one of the girls in the original group a big sister once a week. When we broached the subject with her mother she inferred that this is not just an art class and took her out of the group. Therapy is a sensitive topic within the Jewish Orthodox community, it is not widely accepted yet and there is a lot of stigma attached to it.

Using single system design to measure my effectiveness as group leader within this group that I have autonomy over is the most responsible way I can think of to show my supervisor how things are progressing within the group. My supervisor is looking forward to my results and is happy that I am incorporating what I am learning in class into my practice. Single system design is useful for four reasons; the first reason is it links practice and evaluation making it one activity to assist the helping professional. The second reason is it evaluates whether the desired changes have occurred and the third reason builds on the second by evaluating whether the practitioner’s intervention could be causally linked to these observed changes. The fourth reason is it enables the practitioner to compare the effectiveness of different interventions at a later date. (Bloom, Fischer, & Orme, 2006) Test-retest reliability, which means measuring the same group of people with the same measure on two different occasions, is another reason single system design effective as a measuring tool. By directly observing the behavior of the group on many different occasions and keeping a log one can measure (allowing for human error) the effectiveness of their practice. (Bloom, et al, 2006)

My goal for the group is group cohesion; I plan on measuring this by counting the amount of times each girl interacts with another member of the group. Since the group is comprised of six girls I should be able to keep track of this with relative accuracy based on how accurate direct observation is while accounting for human error. Since I will always be the one teaching the art lesson and more often than not instructing the girls during the social skills set this may prove somewhat difficult. Foreseeing this I have decided to incorporate interobserver reliability, this means I will be having my co-interns who take turns coming to the group help me count the number of interactions at the same time that I am counting to make sure our numbers are the same. (Bloom, et al, 2006)

The validity of this particular study should be simple to determine since it is not up to the client to answer any questions that they may not understand or may be in denial concerning. The only error I will have to be wary of is that of my own direct observational skills. (Bloom, et al, 2006)

References

Bloom, M., Fischer, J., & Orme, J. G. (2006). Evaluating Practice, Guidlines for the Accountable Professional, Fifth Edition. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.