Needs Assessment

A Creative And Practical Guide For Social Scientists

Rebecca Reviere

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317763512
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

First published in 1997. A well-planned, methodically sound needs assessment can and should be a powerful guiding force for change. As a type of applied social research, needs assessment is meant to foster program development and policy-making. Needs assessments can be used as information-gathering tools by a wide range of organizations, agencies, and social scientists at local, state, regional, and national levels, and can be conducted under a variety of arrangements. This book provides a comprehensive guide to the needs assessment process, from conceptualization through implementation and dissemination of findings.

1

Introduction: Setting the Stage

Rebecca Reviere
Susan Berkowitz
Carolyn C. Carter
Carolyn Graves Ferguson

Needs assessments are tools. They are tools designed to identify what a particular group of persons lacks to achieve more satisfactory lives. Despite the absence of a single standardized methodology or cohesive body of guiding theory, needs assessment has become increasingly popular. Because families and other informal support networks are unable to satisfy all of an individual’s needs, people are turning more often to professionals and public and private agencies for assistance. Formal organizations must know what services and programs will adequately remediate or solve these problems. Along these same lines, agencies must know if and how well their programs are working. In addition, because today’s population is increasingly diverse, service providers and social scientists can no longer assume that what they have done in the past remains appropriate for their present constituency.

These changes in assistance and population patterns are further complicated by limited funds. Scarce monies make underwriting a needs assessment project more difficult, but also more necessary. As finances become tighter, resources are increasingly targeted to the most needy, and accountability becomes paramount. Data acquired from needs assessment are necessary to help organizations make educated decisions in planning programs and allocating resources.

Although the type of information required to assess need and its intended uses may vary widely, many organizations will find, at some point in time, that they must assess needs to achieve their goals. Today organizations at all levels are undergoing some form of restructuring, streamlining, reinventing, or reorganizing. Public, private, nonprofit, and proprietary systems are beginning to recognize that services can no longer be provided in the same manner or to the same populations as in the past.

The impetus for conducting a needs assessment can come from a variety of levels. First, it can come from within the community. County citizens may express a desire for improved health and sanitation facilities, and a needs assessment will be required to determine the amount and location of services. At another level, the need for information may emerge from within an organization. For example, a lean budget year might create a need to justify the reasons why certain programs should be maintained (i.e., not cut). A third reason for carrying out a needs assessment may be political. For example, federal mandates may require documentation of needs for maintaining or expanding the allocation of funds for a particular program.

Needs assessments are tools used by a variety of organizations, agencies, and social scientists with differing needs for information. Governments employ needs assessments to outreach to their constituencies, keep in touch with community sentiments, and decide how best to allocate funds. Social scientists are interested in needs assessments as a means to track population status, analyze statistics, and answer basic questions. Service-providing agencies assess the extent of service use and the gap between need and use to plan for the future. Advocacy groups use needs assessments to justify their activities.

Similarly, needs assessments are conducted under a variety of arrangements. A legislative mandate to an agency dealing with the elderly could be conducted by an in-house researcher. A foundation concerned with child welfare might be interested in the needs of its constituency and contract with a consulting firm to carry out the assessment. A human service agency concerned about the mental health needs of its clientele might write a grant to a funder to conduct the project. A state governmental agency might decide to underwrite a study investigating needs of the disabled population as it implements new laws. Because needs assessments occur under various structural conditions, terms may vary from situation to situation. Here the terms agency and sponsoring organization are used interchangeably and specify the organization housing the needs assessment.

BROADENING THE SCOPE OF NEEDS ASSESSMENT

This book is designed to further professionalize the field by broadening the scope of needs assessment in several ways. First, this book challenges readers to rethink basic assumptions and definitions of needs assessments, and to enlarge the idea of what types of endeavors can properly be called needs assessments. This book demonstrates that a variety of different perspectives can be taken on how to conceptualize needs assessment, all of them legitimate and potentially mutually informing. Whether a given project is viewed as a needs assessment depends, in part, on the vantage point, or “slant,” that one takes.

A broadened conception of needs assessment is also required because, as chapters 6–8 of this book show, needs assessment methods are being applied to widely varied populations, some of them marginal to the middle-class mainstream. Individuals in these groups may lack the experience or ability to articulate needs in a way that makes sense to the dominant culture and to traditional service-providing agencies. Yet these groups are more likely than middle-class mainstream populations to be the subjects of needs assessments. Bearing this in mind, the chapters that follow sensitize readers to the importance of creating a suitable fit between the definition of needs assessment used and the characteristics of the population whose needs are presumably assessed.

This book also enhances the perspective on needs assessment by expanding views on the range of methods that can legitimately be used, and creatively combined, in assessing need. The tendency has been to rely on the same methods used in previous efforts, even when this is not technically necessary. In contrast, asking which methods or combinations of methods are most suitable for answering the questions at hand can open the methodological vistas of those who design and conduct needs assessments. Creative thinking about which methods might work best provides the most interesting opportunities to examine different dimensions of the question at hand.

This book also broadens thinking about the practice of needs assessment by showing that there are different kinds and levels of audiences for needs assessments. Policymakers might not be interested in the specific findings for a particular county, but might want to see how that county compares with other counties. Researchers might want to know more about how and why the needs assessment was conducted to determine whether application of similar methods would work for a totally different population in another part of the country. However, most needs assessments have been limited projects designed to provide local decision makers with information on specific populations or groups. This has obscured the common basis of needs assessment and has helped foster a somewhat haphazard approach to needs assessments. This book creates a much larger potential audience for needs assessment efforts by moving beyond the usual emphasis on the empirical findings to setting the results and methods in a broader framework.

This book also consciously moves beyond the segmentation by discipline or by “interest area” that currently exists in the field; it does so by demonstrating how needs assessment methods can be applied to a wide variety of groups. For example, gerontologists doing needs assessments of the frail elderly may be largely unaware of efforts to evaluate the independent living needs of disabled or deinstitutionalized mentally ill persons. Those who deliver services to these superficially different groups actually confront similar issues. Thus, there is much of potential interest and use to gerontologists in what professionals in disabilities or mental health are doing and vice versa.

Although virtually everyone agrees that simply producing data has little effect, relatively little systematic written attention has been paid to practical and strategic issues of how to effectively disseminate and use the results of need assessments to make a positive impact on policies and practices. This is especially surprising in a field with such a strong applied orientation. Why else are needs assessments done but to provide information useful for implementing policy decisions or program changes? In keeping with its practical focus, this book illustrates how researchers can facilitate the effective utilization and dissemination of results by early involvement with the various constituencies interested in the results, and by developing recommendations that are concrete, realistic, action-oriented, and tailored to the specific context and policy environment.

CONCEPTUAL ISSUES

One purpose of this book is to broaden the working definition of and to supply a conceptual model for needs assessment. Defining and evaluating need is not as straightforward as might be assumed. On the surface, it seems a simple matter of finding out what people need. The underlying assumptions are either that existing data will be self-evident in this regard or that people will know what they need so that all one has to do is ask. This begs a host of questions. What does it mean to say that a person or community needs a particular service? What is the difference between need and want? It is relatively easy to decide that a starving person needs food or a homeless person needs shelter. But what if an assessment points to areas of need that are not acknowledged by the individuals themselves, who may believe they need something else altogether? What if the target population and the service providers in the community recognize different areas of need or disagree as to what will best meet that need?

DEFINITIONS OF NEED

Needs are relative to the life experiences of individuals as defined within the framework of a reference group—the group against which status and performance are measured. Specific historical antecedents condition individuals to certain levels of expectations, which, in turn, influence how they define what is needed or necessary to meet some basic standard. Individuals who lived through the scarcities of the Depression, for example, may experience need very differently from ones who came of age during the affluence of the Baby Boom. Age also shapes conceptions of need. For example, although many older individuals clearly experience poorer health than younger persons, the former have a tendency to rate their health relatively highly based on their perceptions of their own health compared with the health of other older people (Stoller, 1984). Estimations of needs would be expected to work similarly, in that they are defined in the context of one’s individual and generational experiences.

If standards of need are assumed to be relative, for the sake of comparison, there must be a base group to serve as a standard against which to evaluate levels of need. In needs assessment, the comparison group is most appropriately the relevant community of which the target population is a part. Although national standards do exist for some needs and programs, it is unrealistic to expect standards to apply equally to urban areas of northern California and rural parts of southern Alabama.

Various writers have discussed the concept of need. One of the best known is Abraham Maslow (1954), who developed the notion of a “hierarchy of needs.” Based on ascending levels of more complex needs, Maslow hypothesized that, once a lower level need is met, humans move on to other higher order needs. Basic needs for sustenance and safety give way to higher needs for love from others, self-love, and self-actualization. Often criticized for simplicity and linearity, Maslow’s model nevertheless suggests that needs are knowable, and that meeting one set of needs may leave a person open to experiencing another set of more complex needs.

Bradshaw (1972) developed a taxonomy of four types of social need. In this scheme, normative needs are those defined by professionals in given situations; as such, they are likely to be paternalistic. Felt need is equated with want and may not truly represent need at all. Expressed need is felt need turned into action; in other words, it is demand. Finally, comparative need is the gap between service receipt between two similar groups.

York (1982) politicized the definition of need as a social problem when he stated that “social concerns come to be defined as social problems through a political process in which varying actors have stakes in divergent outcomes” (p. 53). McKillip (1987) suggested that need was a “value judgment that some group has a problem that can be solved” (p. 10). Introducing the concept of values into the discussion of needs pushes the discourse onto a different plane. Although the importance of measuring needs is generally accepted in social science research, many early social scientists loudly denounced the inclusion of values, however implicit or explicit, in their work. More recently, scholars have criticized the very idea of value-free research, and social scientists are increasingly willing to openly state and address the values implicit in their work.

Values

Simply stated, values are ideas about what is good, right, and desirable. Although abstract, values are generally thought to be a central basis for judgment and behavior. The subtle, yet significant, role of values must be recognized early in the decisions and definitions surrounding needs assessment. “Professionals” often believe that, given enough money and freedom, problems can be found and eliminated. However, considering the diversity of interpretations of need, it is important to recognize and be prepared to work with this variety of values and value assumptions. The time to acknowledge and examine any underlying value conflicts or differences in basic assumptions is during the planning stages of a needs assessment. A “consumer” model of needs assessment works best for well-educated, mainstream middle-class adults who are reasonably practiced in expressing their needs as individuals. It breaks down, to one extent or another, when applied to groups that live on the periphery of mainstream culture—be they homeless, people with serious mental health problems, or poor. As needs assessment is increasingly focused on the disenfranchised, it becomes more important than ever to allow these groups to speak in their own voices and to hear what they say without imposing preconceived notions. In a needs assessment, values must be discussed openly by the researchers and others involved throughout the process.

Need

Need is defined as a gap—between the real and ideal conditions—that is both acknowledged by community values and potentially amenable to change. This definition has three parts. First, a gap must exist between the real and the ideal conditions in a community. Differences will always exist, and individuals will always be arranged on a continuum from more to less needy. Nonetheless, narrowing the gap is a positive goal. Second, this gap must be perceived and acknowledged as a need by a community. Few, if any, communities have only one consistent or recognizable set of values. Many agencies and organizations, however, assume that they can and do make life “better” for their clients. One task of a needs assessment is to check this assumption, ensuring that all involved groups agree on the direction in which to move to achieve improvement. Third, the gap must be amenable to change; needs must be potentially satisfiable. If no change is possible (i.e., walking after a spinal cord injury), energies should be focused on conditions that are modifiable (i.e., designing a better wheelchair).

Definitions of Needs Assessment

Needs assessment has been defined in many ways. According to the United Way of America (1982), “needs assessment is a systematic process of collection and analysis as inputs into resource allocation decisions with a view to discovering and identifying goods and services the community is lacking in relation to the generally accepted standards, and for which there exists some consensus as to the community’s responsibility for their provision” (p. 2). York (1982) stated simply that needs assessment is a “measure of how much of what is needed.” For McKillip (1987), needs assessment is a process of “ordering and prioritization” of community needs.

These definitions implicitly assume that needs assessment is basically a method of data collection or population description. The present approach differs. Needs assessment is defined here as a systematic and ongoing process of providing usable and useful information about the needs of the target population—to those who can and will utilize it to make judgments about policy and programs. Needs assessment is population-specific, but systemically focused, empirically based, and outcome-oriented. Needs assessment, then, is a form of applied research that extends beyond data collection and analysis to cover the utilization of the findings.

THE ORGANIZATIONAL AND POLITICAL CONTEXT OF NEEDS ASSESSMENT

Needs assessments are not carried out in a vacuum, but in an organization that may be facing external as well as internal political pressures of various kinds. These multiple political forces are real and must be considered, along with the purpose of the information gathering, from the beginning. Rarely do agencies develop, plan, and operate their services and programs without significant input, restrictions, and modifications from the political context in which they operate. These political constraints can influence such things as budget, personnel, and resources available, and scope of the problem investigated.

In addition to external political pressures, the internal apparatus of the organization has an impact on the project. Internal pressures may come from constituents, clients, and coworkers. Agencies are political beings; they were organized through political bargaining, and staff members come to work with their own agendas (including keeping their own jobs). Further, the assessment is done to facilitate decision making concerning policies and programs that will exist in this same political arena and impact different individuals in different ways.

Guba and Lincoln (1981) suggested that evaluation is always disruptive of the prevailing political balance. The measurement process has impact primarily because the findings are interpreted and acted on. Therefore, other political forces may come into play. If housing is needed for the elderly, monies may have to be channeled away from transportation. Rearrangements of resources and priorities resulting from the needs assessment can ultimately impact intra-and interagency relationships in a shifting political field.

Just as support may come from various places, resistance to carrying out the needs assessment may also develop from different sources. For example, divided political loyalties may impinge on support for a needs assessment. Other persons within the organization may feel that their territory is being threatened by the project and attempt to sabotage it. Service providers may believe that research interferes with their primary goal of service delivery. Posavac and Carey (1989) listed other possible sources of resistance: (a) those who fear change (e.g., their program may be eliminated), (b) those who fear the information may be abused, (c) those who resist quantification, (d) those who resist the cost of the project, and (e) those who resent needless work (e.g., those who believe nothing will come of it anyway). These pressures must be acknowledged and confronted when the purpose of the needs assessment is first articulated. Methods for examining the possible impact of internal and external factors are discussed in chapter 5.

STAKEHOLDERS

One means of negotiating the maze of issues that arise...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Setting the Stage
• Understanding and Developing Needs Assessment
• Creating the Research Design for a Needs Assessment
• Taking the Sample Survey Approach
• Using Qualitative and Mixed-Method Approaches
• Planning a Needs Assessment
• Case Studies: Various Approaches
• Assessing the AIDS-Related Needs of Women in an Urban Housing Development
• Assessing Child and Maternal Health: The First Step in the Design of Community-Based Interventions
• Assessing the Needs of the Elderly: Two Approaches
• Dissemination and Future Strategies
• Using and Communicating Findings
• Building for Future Needs Assessments
• References
• Suggested Additional Readings
• Index