Guest post from: Professor Jonathan
Scourfield, Cardiff School of Social Sciences
My general pitch in writing this blog is
to argue that social care researchers could make much more use out of existing
data sources. Typically when our MA Social Work students are thinking about
possible small-scale empirical projects they can carry out, they assume they
need to collect their own data. Now the problem with collecting your own data
is that it is very time-consuming and a busy Masters student (or indeed a busy
practitioner researcher or academic researcher) might just find their data
coverage ends up being disappointing. What a lot of people don't realise is
that there are some large-scale data out there already collected that can be
used for further research.
The UK Data Archive has lots of fabulous data sets which are cruelly under-used. In this paper we looked at the major UK panel and cohort studies conducted over many years to see which included data on social work services. The questions about social work contact were typically very limited, but there were seven studies with some potential for social work research. In a new project funded by the Nuffield Foundation, which you can find here , we'll be seeing what we can do with four of these studies.
A recently completed example, using a
cross-sectional survey, is that Tom Slater used a psychiatric morbidity study
for his PhD on social
workers' role in preventing suicide , available here
The UK Data Archive has lots of fabulous data sets which are cruelly under-used. In this paper we looked at the major UK panel and cohort studies conducted over many years to see which included data on social work services. The questions about social work contact were typically very limited, but there were seven studies with some potential for social work research. In a new project funded by the Nuffield Foundation, which you can find here , we'll be seeing what we can do with four of these studies.
. This data set is freely available to anyone
registered with a UK university. No special permissions are needed and all data
are already anonymised. Although many of the data set in the UK Data
Archive require statistical analysis, there are also qualitative data sets
available for secondary analysis. These include such classic social work
studies as Dingwall et al's well known ethnographic research from the late
1970s-early 1980s 'The Protection of Children' and Townsend's research on the
family lives of older people.
Routine social care data are the other
major source for secondary research. Social care providers of course keep data
on service users and these data can be used for research purposes, up to a
point. I say up to a point because of course it is not appropriate for just
anyone to have access to someone's personal records. But it is possible to
produce anonymised versions of quantitative data with all identifying details
removed. Even routine data which are more qualitative, and therefore more
difficult to anonymise, can be used for research purposes in some
circumstances. Nowadays there are also potential opportunities to link routine
social care data with anonymised health records, for example via the SAIL databank
at Swansea here . A couple of new research projects in Welsh
universities are about to do just that, with the support of NISCHR, and I look
forward to seeing the results.
Watch Professor Scourfield talk about his research:
