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Site Index
About The Option 2 Intervention
Training and Consultancy Services
Reports, Reviews and Evaluation
The Option 2 Statistical Database
Rhoda Emlyn-Jones OBE!
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Families First Middlesbrough named Drug Team of the Year! ---
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The Happiness Project
for some time now we have been thinking about outcomes for families other than their level of personal goal achievement. Already we ask them to give us written feedback about how they have felt about the intervention. But we have wanted to drill a little deeper into how families felt about themselves and their lives following an option 2 intervention, and to try to understand what was different for them. We already knew from written feedback that families said they felt happier, more hopeful, more positive about the future, but this was ad-hoc, we never asked specific questions and we didn't ask them before the intervention how they felt. We needed something that had some statistical validity, that gave us a measured output that we could rely on.
About five years agowe started looking for a tool that would help us to measure this. And believe me we have trawled through a lot of tools. The project died for a while as other things began to assume more importance. But a few months ago we resumed work on it.
We wanted to find a tool that would fulfil the following criteria:
And so we threw out dozens of tools which in one way or another did not meet the criteria.
One was left - The Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well Being Scale - WEMWBS.
We have started to pilot this scale in Cardiff and the Vale and so far it is looking like it might do what we want it to do. At this point we use it as close to the beginning of the intervention as possible, then at closure and again at the six month follow up point. All the scores will go into a spreadsheet and we will see what emerges!
Workers have begun to use it is a jumping off point for discussions with clients and also as feedback at the end of an intervention about what has changed. That is causing some debate in the team about its further usefulness as a therapeutic tool and whether using it that way dilutes its effectiveness as a measure. The debate continues.
Have a look at the tool here.
And you can read more about the WEMWBS scale on this website: http://hqlo.com/content/5/1/63
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