What is this Guide for?

This section explains what this guide is for. Everyone should read this.

This Guide for Needs Assessment is a tool that will help workers and youth work together as a team. The guide will help them to figure out what each young person can or could do well (their capabilities and capacities) and, also, what is ‘needed,’ that is, if there is anything missing, absent or required in a young person’s life.

The Guide recognizes that people are all different and that it takes time for people to get to know each other and to learn what works best for different people in different situations. Sometimes, getting to know new people can be confusing, especially if they come from different parts of the world (or even different parts of the same city), if they are very different in age and, even sometimes, if they are of the opposite sex. When a young person first meets with a new youth worker, she or he doesn’t know what to expect. This may be the first person the young person has worked with or the twenty-first, but she or he still doesn’t know what this person is going to be like. It may be hard at first because neither the worker nor the young person really know each other, but things can work well if both the worker and the youth help each other out. This Guide is designed to assist both the young person and the worker to find the best possible ways to work together.

For workers and young people to have the best chance at working as a team, they need to get to know each other. If a worker knows what is important to each youth, what the young person thinks about things, what makes him or her happy or mad, and so on, the worker will be better able to understand where the young person is coming from. This way the worker might know when to leave something alone for a while or might make suggestions that really fit with that young person, and what he or she likes or wants to do. In the same way, young people might find it good to know some things about the worker who is helping them.

This guide will give young people and their workers some ideas about how to work together in a positive way. This guide also provides questions that help people to think about things that are important in a helping relationship. Young people and workers who use the guide will probably learn something new and useful about themselves. Working through some or all of the questions in this guide can help young people and their workers talk about things together so that they can figure out what is helpful and useful for the young person participating in the assessment.

This guide is not intended to replace existing tools that agencies may use, especially risk assessment procedures. We believe that risk assessment should be linked carefully with needs assessment and that one does not replace the other. This guide is meant to:

1. be simple and easy to use,
2. improve workers’ and youth’s understanding of young people’s needs,
3. assist in better planning to meet youth’s needs, and
4. involve youth directly in the assessment and planning process.

Background Research and Policy

This section will be of interest to some because it explains why this guide was created.

This guide takes the British Columbia "Youth Policy Framework" seriously. This document, released in May 2000 by the Ministry for Children and Families (now Ministry of Children and Family Development), outlines youth needs that are similar to those articulated in the national youth policy documents presented at the Civicus Conference in 2001. The Ministry of Children and Family Development Youth Policy proposes to address youth's needs within the context of key environmental influences, which affect the youth's health and well-being. The influences highlighted are the "social and economic conditions in which youth live, play, and work," their "sense of control," and their "family and social connections." Under each of these aspects are listed those needs which are considered necessary to securing healthy and positive outcomes for youth. The document suggests that the planning of service delivery to youth should be based upon the needs identified within this environmental perspective (2000, p. 5).

British Columbia Youth Policy Framework

The research on understanding needs supports British Columbia’s policy and identifies four critical components as necessary to good needs assessment: positive relationship, sensitivity to gender and culture, voice and planned change grounded in theory (Ricks & Charlesworth, 2000; Sharpe, 2001a & b; Van Bockern, 1998).

This guide is based on the research mentioned above and additional research and consultation with youth and workers from three Vancouver Island communities. A key point that emerged in focus groups and interviews with workers and youth was that positive relationships are essential to needs assessment. The importance of relationship was also noted by Clark (2001) who, in his research on 40 years of psychotherapy outcome studies, found that after individual client factors, such as capability, capacity and potential which account for 40% of behaviour change, positive worker-youth relationship accounts for 30% of behaviour change. Along with client factors and relationship, hope and expectancy are grounded in the following: 1) worker’s success at conveying an attitude of positive expectancy without minimizing the problems and pain faced by the youth, 2) the worker’s skill at turning the focus of the youth’s efforts towards the present and the future instead of the past, and 3) the worker’s ability to instill a sense of self-efficacy and possibility in the youth. These hope and expectancy-related factors account for 15% of behaviour change, and finally, intervention techniques, programs or models account for the remaining 15%. Thus, taken together, client capability, the relationship between client and worker, and hope and expectancy account for 85 % of behaviour change, while technique accounts for only 15%. Research like Clark’s (2001) has shown us that the relationship between people and their workers is very important. Young people find it most helpful when they and their workers can find hope together in the young person’s situation while paying attention to the problems and pain in the young person’s life. Young people also find it helpful when they and their workers can focus on the ‘now’ and ‘tomorrow,’ instead of the past. Young people find it helpful when they and their workers have conversations about what the young person can and/or has done well and what good things they can do in the future.

Youth told us repeatedly that they do not cooperate with workers with whom they have no established connections or with assessments that they believe are disrespectful and intrusive–that is, assessments that ask them to answer what youth described as "irrelevant and demeaning" questions about their personal lives, relationships and activities. Clark (2001) also recognized this dynamic and stressed a very important point often overlooked by adults. It is the youth’s assessment of her/his relationship with the worker that matters. If a young person doesn’t feel positive about and involved in the relationship with the worker, the relationship doesn’t really exist, regardless of how it may be defined by the worker. As Clark noted, it is important that young people feel they have a good relationship with their worker–what young people think, their experiences and their opinions matter.

Clark (2001) also comments on the reason why diagnoses of problems based on impersonal assessments don’t work. Youth are active and generative, the severity and magnitude and frequency of problems are constantly changing, and change itself is a powerful client factor. Thus, as he points out, we do youth a profound disservice if we take an approach that represents their problems as static and constant, that is, as captured in diagnostic labels, because this implies that a youth’s presenting problems have a quality of permanence that is contradictory to the notion of change. Clark states that worker "expertise continues to be vital and required; but only to guide and raise the three critical ingredients–the tactical triad–of a youth’s resources, perceptions and participation" (p. 26). These critical ingredients should, therefore, be a part of any assessment and are, for that reason, included here. Young people and workers should not focus on ‘what is wrong and what a person cannot do,’ but instead what a young person can already do and has in his or her life, what she or he thinks, and what she or he is willing to try.

This guide was designed to be particularly sensitive to gender, sexual identity and cultural diversity. Gender, sexual orientation and culture are important considerations because our individual experiences in each of these areas shapes how we see others and ourselves.

Gender

Women often put aside their own needs in order to meet the needs of others (Gilligan, 1982). For women in Euro-western culture, maturity is still defined mostly in terms of their relationships and on a morality of care based on holding together relationships and emotional ties. Disconnections and violations in girls’ relationships will often affect their well-being in a negative way, will undermine their ability to trust themselves and others, and may even keep them from staying in school (Miller, 1988). Artz (1998) found that, especially for girls who are experiencing problems in their lives, being close usually means being like the person to whom one is close to and being able to feel that person’s feelings. The personal needs of these girls are generally lost in their relationships which demand that they first look after the needs of others.

Adolescent girls today are uncomfortable about identifying and stating their needs because our culture has taught them that it is more important to be nice and unselfish. Thus, workers need to help girls learn to spend time understanding their own feelings and to identify and assert their own needs (Pipher, 1994). Adolescent girls in our culture have grown up in an environment that suggests they look to others rather than to themselves for rewards and praise. This means that girls often become other-oriented, reactive and depressed when someone isn’t there to say that they are okay. Also, living in a world that makes attractiveness a woman’s most important characteristic makes it difficult for adolescent girls to value themselves for anything other than body image (Pipher, 1994; Tanenbaum, 1999). Girls’ negative behavioural symptoms "reflect [among other things] their grief at the loss of their true selves" by being pressured to "put aside their true authentic selves and display only a portion of their gifts," in essence, "to be someone they are not" (Pipher, 1994, p. 22). These social and cultural conditions make it important to be open to girls who present themselves as guarded, assertive, independent, separate and rational (i.e., who present themselves in ways that challenge gender stereotypes) (Leadbeater, Blatt & Quinlan, 1995).

Boys, like girls, also experience problems because of socially constructed rules that tell them how to behave because they are boys (Canada, 1998; Garbarino, 1999; Plummer, 1999). William Pollack (1998) outlines three myths that perpetuate the Boy Code for boys’ behaviour in Euro-western culture that essentially puts boys in a "gender straitjacket."

Pollack (1998, p. 25) stresses the importance of unlearning the Boy Code and making sure that all boys have the opportunity for close, emotionally rich relationships based on connection with others.

Workers, like the youth they serve, are just as capable of being caught up in seeing the world through gendered lenses, lenses which directly affect they way in which they see their clients. Workers should strive to avoid gender bias (Gilbert, 2000). Studies in Australia indicate that workers commonly think that girls are more difficult to work with than boys (Baines & Alder, 1996). They feel this way because they see girls’ needs as emotional rather than as practical, that is, as self-indulgent and too demanding. These workers found that the emotional needs of young women made them feel inadequate as workers because they felt incapable of dealing with those needs. They also viewed young women’s outward expressions of aggression as unfeminine and unacceptable in young women; although, they were quite willing to tolerate, and even applaud, aggression in the boys. Okamoto and Chesney-Lind (2000) also found that gender plays a role with regard to how workers see their clients.

Sexual Orientation

Sexual orientation is another important issue to consider when working with assessment tools. Workers should strive to more fully appreciate and better understand the unique strengths, needs and lifeworlds of gay and lesbian youth and youth who are still struggling to understand their sexual identity (DuBeau, 1998). The assumption that everyone is heterosexual is so dominant that most workers do NOT create opportunities for the expression of sexual diversity (Daley, 1998).

Culture and Needs Assessment

Just as it is important to pay attention to gender, it is important to pay attention to culture. In any society, there are different expectations and demands for behavior, beliefs and adaptations across different cultures, subcultures and situations. These differences come from culturally different ways of thinking about concepts of self and ways of communicating and coping (Neisser, Boodoo, Bouchard, Boykin, Brody, Ceci, et al., 1996). It is, therefore, vital to carefully consider and explore cultural influences during an assessment because unexamined culturally based assumptions may result in confusion, misinterpretation and labeling (Lezak, 1995; DSM-IV, 1994). Before conclusions are drawn about people’s lives, any cultural explanations of issues or problems should be explored, and cultural needs and influences should be examined and understood (Sattler, 1986). The influence of culture on standardized test performance can be significant and should not be overlooked (Lezak, 1995). Thus, any assessments that are not standardized for particular minority groups are of little use to these groups. Further, one should not assume that each member of a minority group experiences his or her ethnicity in the same way (Sattler, 1986).

The particular needs of youth will vary in relation to their culture, experiences, situation, personality and gender (Richardson, 2001). Youth workers need to be aware of their own beliefs and ideas about what is normal for any cultural group and should avoid stereotyping groups of youth. In order to avoid the pitfalls of over-generalizing the shared experiences of any group, an ecological approach to assessment, an approach that looks at all parts of a person’s life, is recommended (Kemp, Whittaker & Tracy, 1997). This needs assessment tool has been designed to consider all the systems within an individual’s life: intrapersonal, family, peer, social, cultural and community. This guide invites a respectful and positive exploration of all aspects of a person’s life as part of needs assessment and makes room for each person’s unique way of being.

How the guide is organized

Workers and young people told us it is important that this guide is youth-friendly and that it should be written in easy-to-understand language. Young people and workers also helped us to understand that there are five important areas to consider during needs assessment with youth. These areas (domains) are: Context, Connectedness, Care, Capability, and Change.

The Context domain includes questions about many things in a young person’s world (environment): where he/she is living, school, the neighborhood and community, the youth’s cultural and ethnic heritage and his/her gender identity. It also includes things that affect the youth both directly and indirectly (such as opportunity for work, the kind of neighborhood they live in and the level of community support available to them).

The Connectedness domain provides questions about the young person’s relationships with his or her family and friends and asks questions that are aimed at helping the young person and the worker get to know each other in the way that best suits what they have to do together.

The Care domain provides questions that help the youth and the worker talk about how they take care of themselves. It also provides questions that help them to talk about their emotions, their expectations of each other and the youth’s feelings and expectations about others involved in the young person’s life.

The Capability domain focuses on what the youth can already do or has done; it emphasizes the young person’s strengths and achievements. It also provides questions that help the youth and the worker talk about the future of the young person.

Finally, the Change domain explores the youth’s sense of responsibility and involvement in facing his or her current identified challenges and the youth’s beliefs about those parts of his or her life that have been identified as problems. This section applies the Transtheoretical Model for Stages of Change developed by Prochaska, DiClemente and Norcross (1992), which is a carefully thought out way of understanding anyone’s views of his or her problems. This approach recognizes that what is a problem for some is not a problem for others. This allows workers and youth to determine the youth’s current way of seeing his or her problem so that they can come up with the best way to approach the problem.

Research on needs assessment supports the above five areas as important to any needs assessment with young people. In the guide, along with questions that will allow workers and youth to ask each other questions and answer questions in the five areas, we explain the focus of each area, and we provide a way to figure out what to do if anything is found to be ‘needed’ in each of the areas.

The guide gives youth an important role (as they should have) in the assessment process by inviting young people who are being assessed to ask questions of workers. This two-way information exchange is meant to assist in the creation of a good helping relationship. This approach is supported by Child, Family And Community Service Act Rsbc 1996, Chapter 46, Guiding Principles 2 (d), which states that the child's views should be taken into account when decisions relating to a child are made.

Additional resources and support for using this guide can be found on this site, including the literature review and web links.

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