Why Is It Important To Measure In Social Work

Feeling being torn between what can be measured and what cannot be measured highlight that there are different sides, thoughts and feelings about measurements in social work. The informants' struggles between the measurable, the things not so easily measured and those things that are difficult or impossible to measure. There is a great uncertainty amongst the informants around the credibility and reliability in the results used and many of them strongly emphasize that measuring troubles them, “we work with people; they are not a product or material things” (IP 5). The lived experience of things that are measurable or not measurable shifts between informants. It is largely their own personal inner conviction that determines how you think and feel about measurements in social work. All respondents express some degree of duality towards the phenomenon. For some of the interviewees this is a much more determined issue than for others, and for some yet something both possible and impossible at the same time.

In our work, it is so much that has grey areas dealing with/…/. People-being solutions to these kinds of things take a long time and are diffuse and are different for different individuals, which means we cannot
When one doesn´t know what it is that affect the outcome and do not really know what one is measuring, then it becomes difficult to understand what the measurements really will contribute to other than to act as a financial instrument. Uncertainty is something that appears in all the narratives as well as a strong inner conviction that cause and action are not something that can be used as a measurement in Social Work. This is reflected in the kind of vagueness that the interviewed use when describing feeling themselves caught in the middle of what can be measured and what cannot be