BJSW Advance Access originally published online on October 3, 2005
British Journal of Social Work 2006 36(2):207-226; doi:10.1093/bjsw/bch307
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Assessing the Quality of Knowledge in Social Care: Exploring the Potential of a Set of Generic Standards
Andrew Long joined the School of Healthcare, University of Leeds, in March 2005. From 1997 to 2005, he led an inter-disciplinary research centre at the University of Salford, with a primary focus on the evaluation of health and social care interventions and service configurations within the wider context of enhancing evidence-based practice. Andrew is a health services researcher and educator who in the last 10 years has focused on issues in outcome measurement, critical appraisal and effectiveness in health and social care, and complementary and alternative medicine. This has led to the development of a number of evaluation tools for quantitative and qualitative research studies and outcome measures.
Lesley Grayson has been Research Fellow (Information Access) at the ESRC UK Centre for Evidence Based Policy and Practice, Queen Mary, University of London, since April 2000. Her role includes database searching and other types of information support for the research activities of the Centre, its associated research partners and external clients. Prior to joining the Centre, she worked for some 25 years as a freelance journal editor, indexer and bibliographer, producing specialist literature reviews in a wide range of public policy fields.
Annette Boaz is a research fellow in the ESRC UK Centre for Evidence Based Policy and Practice, Queen Mary, University of London. She is currently involved in a programme of training, development and methodological work relating to evidence-based policy and practice. Annette has previously worked at the Department of Health and at the Universities of Oxford and Warwick, carrying out research in a wide variety of policy areas. She has completed evaluations for the Cabinet Office and the Home Office and worked in the Policy Research Programme at the Department of Health, learning about research commissioning, management and utilization.
Correspondence to Professor Andrew Long, School of Healthcare, University of Leeds, Baines Wing, Leeds LS2 9UT, UK. E-mail: a.f.long{at}leeds.ac.uk
Social care policy and practice draw on multiple sources of knowledge. In order to help practitioners and policymakers identify and act on the basis of high quality evidence, ways of assessing the quality of this knowledge are needed. Part of the answer may lie in the use of a set of generic standards. To test the potentiality of this approach, one document from each of five core domains of social care knowledge was selected and assessed independently by three researchers using a set of generic standards developed within a study commissioned by the Social Care Institute for Excellence. Critical reflections on feasibility and added value were recorded. Each reviewer successfully applied the set of standards to each document, but faced problems with interpretation and the identification of source-specific standards. Use of the TAPUPAS schema forced consideration of the strengths and weaknesses of each document and broadened the common notion of quality and quality assessment to sources beyond the traditional research domain. This small-scale testing suggests the potential of the schema to enable assessments of quality to be applied across knowledge sources within both social care and other applied discipline areas such as health and education. As with any quality assessment tool, training in its use is required.
Keywords: Standards, knowledge, quality assessment, social care
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