Evidence-based policy? where is our theory of evidence?

Two articles featured in the latest edition of the Journal of Children’s Services highlight the complexity of measuring what services children and families receive.

The Good Behaviour Game, discussed by Katherine Hynes and colleagues from Penn Sate University, Pennsylvania, US, can be quantified in terms of the number, length and frequency of sessions and quality of delivery.
 
But as editors Nick Axford and Michael Little point out, “Very few children who may be in desperate need of such carefully administered help come anywhere near such manualised programmes.” One attempt to help capture the complexity of ‘services as normal’ is the Client Service Receipt Inventory (CSRI), used in adapted form by Elizabeth Monck and Alan Rushton to chart the use of post-adoption help.
 
However, the editors suggest that for all its strengths the measure “pays more attention to the frequency and location of contacts with agencies and professionals than to service content” and that “the detail relates primarily to hospital visits and school-based provision”. These are two of the better approaches to measuring services available, they argue. “Most accounts actually say surprisingly little about what children or families received. They make it no easier to imagine what a service ‘looks like’.
 
“There is a case for developing and testing new research measures of service provision and a need for a degree of standardisation across agencies in terms of how service use is represented in assessment tools and statistical returns. They acknowledge the potential pitfalls with this but argue that something needs to be done: “Critics may argue that this approach is hopelessly reductive: a service is fundamentally relational – a complex and dynamic transaction between two or more people.
 
One may as well try to understand affection by anatomising a kiss. “Currently, however, disparities in language, classification, type of information recorded and format prohibit meaningful comparison or the compilation of data for individual children.”