Measuring Difficult-to-Measure Concepts in Clinical Social Work Practice Operationalizing Psychosocial Well-Being Among War-Affected Women: A Case Study in Northern Uganda

This article addresses the question of how to define, operationalize, and measure psychological and social well-being. Well-being is a concept central to successful outcomes in clinical social work practice, and its promotion is a goal of the profession, yet it is rarely taken into account when we develop evidence-based practices. The complexity of the construct has led to it being described in the literature as “unmeasurable” (Corlazzoli and White in Measuring the un-measurable: solutions to measurement challenges in fragile and conflict-affected environments. Department for International Development (DFID), London, 2013). This article describes and discusses a participatory study of 649 conflict-affected women in a post-conflict region of Northern Uganda that used grounded theory to define and operationalize this concept from the standpoint of women program participants for the purpose of future monitoring and evaluation. The results indicated that poor and often marginalized conflict-affected women were able to envision, articulate, and describe their future well-being, with implications for other populations experiencing severe adversity. The study resulted in the development of a practical method to evaluate the effectiveness of future programs from the standpoint of program participants.
Source: Clinical Social Work Journal - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research