Emma Belton discusses interviewing families for evaluations in difficult contexts
It’s difficult to get service users with young families and busy lives to take part in an interview at the best of times. But it can be particularly challenging when they feel the service hasn’t helped them or, in some cases, made things worse.
To help professionals who are interviewing in a difficult context, I’m sharing my experience of evaluating the NSPCC’s Assessing the Risk: Protecting the Child (ARPC) service.
ARPC is an assessment service for men who pose a sexual risk to children. It’s a holistic programme involving an assessment of the man deemed to be a risk, the protective parent or carer and the child or children at risk.
The evaluation aimed to interview each of these 3 service users - but this was difficult to achieve in practice.