Measuring the quality of statutory social workers’ communication skills with young people: Reliability of the My Social Work Partner scales

Statutory meetings are at the core of social work practice, yet there is no quantitatively tested common set of criteria for assessing statutory social workers’ communication skills with young people. Reliably measuring such skills is important for the training and supervision of social workers as well for drawing conclusions about whether such skills impact service users’ outcomes. To fill this gap, we developed a new measure, the My Social Work Partner (MRP in Danish abbreviation) scales, which measure 11 dimensions of statutory communication. We tested the inter-coder reliability and intra-coder reliability of codings on the MRP scales using the intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC) in a random sample of 30 videotapes of statutory meetings. Five professional social workers participated in the inter-coder reliability test; three of them coded the same films again after a 3-5-month interval for the intra-coder reliability test. ICC estimates of inter-coder reliability ranged from good to excellent. Intra-coder reliability estimates ranged from fair to excellent. Overall, the results are promising and support the use of the MRP-scales in social work practice with young persons, education and research. Future research will focus on how to improve the intra-coder reliability of the scales, in particular the Dialogue structure scale.