Aims

1. Morag Campbell and Anne Sobek, Scottish Borders Council. Mentor: Prof. Bill Whyte, University of Edinburgh Your view counts!A small scale study of service users’ views of Scottish borders criminal justice social work services • Aims • How well do service users understand the purpose of their contact/involvement with the service? • Do service users understand the purpose of Probation and do they think it is effective? • What do we need to change to improve services to service users? • Methods • Questionnaire survey with service users over a two week period (n=112, return rate 75%) to gauge levels of satisfaction with the service. • Structured interviews with 5 people on probation orders, exploring their understanding of the order and their views about its effectiveness. • Key findings: questionnaire • Questionnaire showed high levels of satisfaction with the service. 81% rated overall service quality as very good or excellent. 80% said the service was excellent or very good at keeping them informed about what is happening. • A minority of respondents were dissatisfied with leaflets and location of appointment. These could be areas for improvement. • Key findings: interviews • Very small number of participants, information therefore of limited value. • Service users were reluctant to take part. Some said they saw no benefit or did not feel comfortable. Most of those who took part were from a group known to have high levels of compliance. • Interviews may not be suitable for use with this group. • Challenges • Recruitment: high return rate for questionnaire but service users reluctant to participate in interviews. • Getting other workers on board: concerns that feedback would be negative and individual workers would be identified. • Balancing practitioners’ existing work commitments with timescale of research. • Solutions? • Need to find better ways to get qualitative feedback from service users. • Feedback was not colleted on an order basis to avoid workers being identified. Questionnaire actually gave positive feedback which has boosted staff morale. • Practitioner researchers’ workload was protected as far as possible. Some unresolved questions: if service users have a high level of satisfaction with the service, why were so few willing to be interviewed? What could have been done differently to obtain qualitative information?