Social Research Unit

Blogs and Ideas

Analysis and sober reflection are fundamental aspects of what we do. But the best ideas usually begin more sketchily among the notes, observations and conversations perhaps collected during fieldwork or in conference corridors. This page captures some of the creative speculations of staff and collaborators.

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Two societies building peace

Blogging gives a wary academic like me the chance to offer up half an idea for debate and trust that feedback and better information will help it on its way to becoming more useful.

Michael Little

Blogging gives a wary academic like me the chance to offer up half an idea for debate and trust that feedback and better information will help it on its way to becoming more useful.

Over the years, I've had a rewarding association with the Basque Country of northern Spain, especially with San Sebastian. I like the life, I've got to know the culture and I've made some good friends.

The Basque country is among the richest of Spain's 15 autonomous regions. It's an important part of the country's industrial base (Bilbao used to belch smoke like an English steelworks) but it nevertheless feels spacious, rural and maritime.

Things here are better than they used to be, but Basques are still blighted outside Spain for associations with terrorism, arising from a long and bewilderingly complicated struggle for independence on the part of a nationalist faction.

I don't pretend to begin to understand the ramifications of the conflict. But about a year ago I became aware that the Basque government was interested in social and emotional regulation programmes. I began to dig around for familiar signs and names but could find none, until I strumbled across Maite Garaigordobil’s assessment of the Basque education department's initiative, A Society that Builds Peace.

This Basque variant on Richard Lerner’s Positive Youth Development Program delivers ten 90-minute classes to 15- and 16-year-old school students, targeting them at just the age when they might be recruited into the remnant of the armed struggle.

The Basque effort is impressive. A randomised control trial involving 285 students in 16 schools is producing very promising results.

Students on the programme began to think differently about how they would behave were they to be confronted by any inducement to be involved in terrorism.

So far I’m on reasonably safe ground. I’ve read the research, I’ve talked to Maite Garaigordobil about it and I’ve met the project co-ordinators.

I’ve also learned that in spite of its early successes, the project is faltering. Stepping now into less familiar country, let me speculate why that might be.

Remarkably, the programme exposes students to the disasters of violence on both sides of the conflict – to testimony not only by the victims ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna) but also by the anti-terrorist factions of previous governments, such as the equally infamous GAL (Grupos Antiterroristas de Liberación).

This year, for the first time in 30 years, the socialist party of Spain – the PSOE – took majority control of the Basque government from one of its partners in previous coalitions, the nationalist PNV.

I wonder if the new administration is less comfortable than its predecessor with the idea of using images of violence and cruel personal testimony as accessories in a violence prevention programme.

What little insight I have to bring is based on my work in Northern Ireland, where any reference to the past activities of paramilitary groups or to anti-terrorist violence would have been the kiss of death to any prevention programme.

Northern Ireland and the Basque Country do not bear comparison. The fundamental nature of the conflict and the prosperity of the two regions are at odds. But I don’t see why the characteristics of prevention programmes appropriate to them both should be very different.

Perhaps there is an opportunity in the Basque County to examine the relative merits of programmes that include or avoid representations of the violence they seek to prevent.

The Basque dilemma feeds into another of my preoccupations: the relationship between prevention activity and large administrative systems. In this instance, the outcome – less political violence – can only be achieved by sustained and saturated delivery of an effective program and policy.

By one, possibly incomplete reading, the system is recoiling from a potentially proven model because the content offends a political sensitivity.

To which politicians might well object that political conflict can be solved only by political means, not by administering prevention programmes in schools, any more than it can by resorting to murder in the streets.

The trouble is that in such circumstances the act of offering a violence prevention programme as a solution is itself a highly political act.

To Tooele, Utah, to see CtC in action

December 4, 2009
The population of Tooele puts on an impressive flagship display of Communities that Care – faithful to the last detail.

Louise Morpeth

December 4, 2009
The population of Tooele puts on an impressive flagship display of Communities that Care – faithful to the last detail.

The population of Tooele puts on an impressive flagship display of Communities that Care – faithful to the last detail.

My day began with a 30-mile bus ride from Salt Lake City to Tooele, a town of 30,000 people in the Salt Lake valley surrounded by snow-capped mountains. I was not alone, there were 20 of us, off to visit a flagship Communities that Care project.

The community’s pride in their achievements was apparent in the enormous efforts put into the programme arranged for us. The town has the lowest per capita income in the state of Utah, but this relative poverty wasn’t apparent as we drove around.

The majority of dwellings we saw were good-sized detached houses, many with large gardens and with four-by-four vehicles parked on the drive. We saw community facilities – a cinema, golf course, shops, fast food outlets and many churches. Most residents are Mormons.

The town population has doubled in ten years. This put pressure on the school system and led to the building of a number of new schools. We visited Clarke N Johnsen Junior High to observe the delivery of Life Skills Training, one of several evidence-based programmes being implemented.

The school was modern, airy and clean. We were warned not to dawdle as we walked to our classroom, as at 10.06am precisely 800 children were to hit the hallways to move to their next lesson. We sat at the back of a class as 20 12-year olds (7th Grade) sauntered into the room to take their places for their science lesson.

We witnessed a very able young female teacher adeptly manage conversations about attraction and dating with a group of cheeky, vocal adolescent boys and girls. We knew exactly what she was expected to do with the class as we had the checklist from the curriculum – it specified what should be covered, how and for how long. She did this effortlessly and with 100% fidelity to the model. The children were engaged and some clearly enjoyed being able to demonstrate to their classmates how they would ask someone out on a date.

The teacher and the children seemed totally unfazed by having seven strangers sitting at the back of the classroom. We were later told that anyone delivering a CtC evidence-based programme expects to be regularly observed as it is part of the commitment to maintain a high level of fidelity. There also seemed to be a culture of openness, where people wanted to do the best they could for children and saw observation not as something critical but as something that would help them do their job better.

We then headed back to City Hall to hear more about CtC’s history and achievements. We had been told during our training that some elements were critical: a skilled co-ordinator, champions, sign-up by key agencies, a common understanding of prevention science, a commitment to fidelity, decisions driven by data and so on. It’s one thing to hear about them in the abstract but something else to witness the result in the flesh.

We were warmly greeted by a smartly dressed, tanned man, who, at a guess, was in his early sixties. This was Milo Berry – recently retired CtC coordinator, long-term resident of Tooele and a teacher in the community since 1967. He was clearly very well-liked and respected by all those involved with CtC and part of the explanation for the project’s success. He set the scene. Immediately the language was familiar. He talked of the project’s champions – the Mayor, Chief of Police and Superintendent of Schools – and of the Community Board, the survey of risk and protective factors and the importance of fidelity.

A succession of people gave their perspective on how the project had transformed their town. A member of the risk and protective factors working group explained how they scrutinised the data that is gathered via the school survey and then make recommendations to the board about the targets and priorities. She said, “I like the cold hard facts; it’s so much better to make decisions this way and not to rely on anecdotes”. We heard how every risk factor had decreased slightly or significantly since the project started in 2004 and that the data had helped the county secure $3 million for prevention programming.

As part of the town’s efforts to recognise their young people’s positive achievements, they created the Mayor’s Community Recognition Award. Young people can be nominated for their positive contribution and they are then invited to receive an award from the Mayor at the beginning of a council meeting. They get a certificate, a bag of goodies and their picture in the local paper. Perhaps more importantly, the council chamber is packed with friends and relatives who go along to see the presentation of the award. The council men and women also get drawn into the work of the project, so that when it comes to budget setting they already have some sense of what the project is trying to do.

Even six years down the line, they still have a clear vision and a sensible programme of work. They have four evidence based programmes (three school based and one for families). They give training on the basics of prevention science to every person, working face-to-face with children in school in the county; they collect risk and protective factor data and are expanding their activities to change community norms. The local cement company, for example, has painted the slogan ‘Teens and alcohol don’t mix’ on the side of all their mixers.

To wrap our day in Tooele, Milo assembled a panel of 12 people who represented the array of different interests in the town, from Shelly, a 16-year-old High School student to Debbie, the Director of the Chamber of Commerce. The Mayor kicked things off by explaining how funding for CtC was now a line item in the city’s budget, and that it remained untouched even when the city was having to reduce its overall spend. When asked just how much it cost he replied, “We have $150k in the budget but there are a lot of intangibles too – like access to city hall and other supplies”.

The Police Chief explained how he had reluctantly been persuaded to disinvest police resources from DARE (a very popular but largely ineffective drugs education programme) to fund Lions-Quest SFA (a proven programme). He strongly believed that having a uniformed officer in school was an important way for students to ‘bond’ with the police. It was not the research evidence that swayed him, rather the pressure applied by his colleagues on the board and that Lions-Quest is integrated into the curriculum and not a standalone programme like DARE.

His officer, Becky Bracken, had been the deliverer of DARE and then took on responsibility for Lions-Quest. She had students who had received both programmes, and when asked which they preferred were very clear about their preference for Lions-Quest. The programme helps children to understand that most young people do not drink alcohol, have sex or do drugs but that many say they do. She told a story of a ‘lightbulb moment’ for a child, when he realised that the very peer-pressure that he felt to try alcohol could be turned the other way to get his peers not to do these things since the non-drinkers were actually the majority.

The panel also included a representative of SAMSHA from the state. She explained how the results of the evaluation of CtC in Tooele had elicited interest from communities across the state. They are now going to offer matched funding to any community wishing to set up a CtC project.

Tooele is a fabulous example of CtC in action. It appears to act as a focal point for all community efforts to prevent problem behaviours and is edging towards sustainability as the way of working gradually gets embedded in the city’s systems. The impact of CtC is evident in the data they collect from young people but not yet visible in the administrative data: receipt into care and juvenile detention are so far unaffected. For the people who hold the purse strings, this is not what matters – they have a mission and it would seem that little will knock them off course.

What if communities really struggle to care?

December 3, 2009
Solid evidence base, inspirational trainers, excellent manuals and materials – it all makes me want know more about what happens when Communities that Care "doesn

Louise Morpeth

It's the end of the training. The folks from Communities that Care have skilfully compressed their nine-day training into two. The team from the Casey Foundation and I have a solid grasp of the what and the how of the CtC system, and tomorrow we’ll see what it looks like when the rubber hits road.

Thanks to the quality of the written products, it’s pretty easy to learn about the system. All the materials – and there are lots of them – are freely available on the web (see http://ncadi.samhsa.gov/features/ctc/resources.aspx). So what do you get from the training session that you can’t get from reading?

The obvious difference is that you get to ask questions. When doesn’t CtC work? What is the maximum and minimum size of a CtC community? How do you make it sustainable? What do you do for out-of-school youth? What next for CtC? and so on. A more important difference is the opportunity to experience the process and hear about it first hand from people in the community.

Dalene Dutton, the CtC coordinator from Five Town Communities that Care in Maine told us how she got involved.

“I was a High School teacher and was getting really concerned about the things that our young people were getting into – like early sex, drugs and drinking. Then in one year we lost five of our students and all the deaths were preventable. Our school was asked what we were going to do about it. We were being held partly responsible. I found it difficult to cope with what had happened and took a year out. It was then that I saw the advert for a CtC co-ordinator. As a science teacher, I was drawn to the scientific approach.”

Dalene’s community has proved to be an exemplar of CtC. As she said, “I’ve seen it work – we have achieved things in five years that we didn’t think were possible”.

Our conversations helped me realise the importance of the CtC co-ordinator and what an unusual mix of skills and traits they need. She understands prevention science, she values data, as a former teacher she has credibility and understands the politics of children’s services agencies. She is a great communicator and has an infectious enthusiasm for improving the lives of young people. I wondered how important it was to find a ‘Dalene’ and how much of the success of projects can be explained by the quality of the co-ordinator.

All that said, Dalene’s community is small – 13,000 people - and not particularly poor. There is resource within the community in terms of peoples’ skills and time that can be harnessed by the project. Would these skills exist where the need is greater? None of the exemplar CtC sites combined diversity, poverty and an urban setting. Would it be possible to replicate the effects in this context?

The public health approach, upon which, CtC is built, requires the definition of the problem, the identification of risk and protection, selection of interventions, and implementation and evaluation. Kevin Haggerty (Assistant Director at Social Development Research Group – the Seattle developers of CtC) bemoaned the fact that when asked about the risk factors for heart disease we can all reel off lack of exercise, poor diet, stress, genetic vulnerability and family history, but the same level of understanding of the risks for problematic behaviour have not seeped into general knowledge in the same way.

CtC provides a list of factors proven to be risks for problematic behaviour and a way of measuring their prevalence. This way a community can focus their efforts on a small number of risks. They are pushed to express these as targets, for example “we will increase levels of commitment to school by 10% over 4 years”. They can then hold themselves to account by measuring their progress against the target.

Left to their own devices, or simply with the CtC manual, it is unlikely that a community would successfully get through all these steps let alone go on to implement programmes with fidelity. Technical assistance appears to be a critical component. To achieve fidelity to the CtC model, technical assistance (training and coaching) is probably essential.

Work in Pennsylvania, where CtC is more widely used and there is limited availability of technical assistance, suggests, despite wide variation in its use community level, that change in attainment and delinquency is apparent. So, technical assistance is probably necessary but a relatively small dose is sufficient.

As part of the training we got to experience what it is like to take a number of risk factors and find appropriate evidence based programmes. We used the CtC Prevention Strategies Guide, a cleverly designed book comprising 56 programmes.

Participants on the training repeatedly commented how the printed materials, particularly the worksheets, helped to make what looks like a complex process manageable. The tools that got the most oohs and aahs were surprisingly simple. The ‘Coordinating Resources Worksheet’ is a good example.

It is a one-page sheet with a 5 x 8 table. It lists down one column the things that are needed to implement a programme: staff, supplies, equipment, administration, technical assistance and transport. Across the top it lists: description, costs, agency that will provide and gaps. Completing the table forces an analysis of what is available and what is needed.

In response to my question about when CtC didn’t seem to work, Kevin Haggerty explained that the manuals, resources and worksheets were in effect the lessons learnt over 30 years of developing the method. So, in response to concerns about sustainability, a worksheet was prepared to analyse political willingness to share or re-direct resources. This helped communities shift from thinking that the only way of getting funding was by bringing in new money to considering the redeployment of existing funds.

It would seem from our discussions over two days that there is potential for further developments, particularly in understanding how CtC has and can bring about system change, and how federal and state dollars may be more easily identified for evidence-based programmes.

It will be particularly interesting to see if and how CtC can work in more challenging settings and with larger populations.

I see the true SEAL

A balance has yet to be struck between the art of framing a national child development policy to apply at scale, and the science of developing an intervention that can be shown to improve children

Michael Little

A balance has yet to be struck between the art of framing a national child development policy to apply at scale, and the science of developing an intervention that can be shown to improve children’s lives.

There are many examples of the former but none that has made a clear impact on child well-being; many of the latter, too, but none that has been taken successfully to scale.

An example of the inherent difficulty is the UK government programme known as SEAL (Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning). It has been made available to every primary school in England, and is now being tried in secondary schools.

On the other side of this particular equation are the 22 school curricula that are known to improve children’s social and emotional development (and also, as Joe Durlak’s recent systematic review indicates, their educational performance).

A starker reading of the basic scenario, which I confess I’ve been inclined to support in the past, points to the failings of a UK government that ignores the evidence and forces everybody to behave in a way that is unlikely to have any impact on children’s lives – not that we’ll ever know, because there’s no funding for rigorous evaluation.

So it was with some misgivings on Friday that I went back to school with a colleague and one of the originators of SEAL to re-examine the story by visiting a small primary in Bristol in the west of England.

It turns out to be not so simple. The rationale for preparing SEAL as an amalgam of proven models instead of implementing one or more off the shelf probably made sense a few years ago when less was known about appropriate adaptation and service design. The champions of SEAL felt that UK teachers would not respond to the detailed lesson plans used by their US counterparts for whom the proven models were designed.

On closer inspection, the malign hand of government turns out to have been a wriggling mass of fingers, thumbs and toes of politicians, civil servants, teachers unions, expert advisors and more. Hearing about what really happened, one realises that it’s something of a miracle that anything at all was delivered, never mind that it should have found its way into more or less every school.

The best example of the final product was impressive: lessons for every stage of a child’s development; lots of evidence of the programme around the school; enthusiastic teachers well supported with manuals, training and coaching; strong leadership, and an interest in monitoring impact.

In this school at least, SEAL seemed just as likely to achieve the impact being sought by proven models such as PATHS (which is being introduced with equivalent care in Birmingham).

SEAL has the advantage of being English, and having the support of government as well as the approval of many teachers and heads.

But we don’t know if it works. Birmingham, which is pitching well supported PATHS against routinely provided SEAL, may provide the beginnings of an answer.

But there are a host of other enquiries and discoveries to be made before we know how to improve the lives of children not in 100 or even 1,000 schools, but in all 25,000 or so English schools.

Of course, all this presupposes that public opinion supports the efforts of schools to improve children’s social and emotional development. On my travels, I also learned about politicians who feel strongly that schools should be about schooling, by which they all too often mean the ‘three Rs,’ when just a few hours in an ordinary primary school would surely convince them that something has to be done to afford students the chance to learn.

One boy, struggling to understand how respect inside the classroom should mirror expectations outside it admitted without embarrassment: ‘We don’t have rules at home. If you do something wrong, you get a slap’

Swapping hats on the way to Salt Lake City

November 30th, 2009
I'm on my way to Salt Lake City for two days training in Communities That Care. It is one of a number of methods (Results based Accountability and Getting to Outcomes are

Louise Morpeth

November 30th, 2009
I'm on my way to Salt Lake City for two days training in Communities That Care. It is one of a number of methods (Results based Accountability and Getting to Outcomes are examples of others) concerned with changing what is done to improve children’s lives.

As someone who regularly trains others in a methodology for improving outcomes – in my case Common Language, I’m looking forward to the experience.

It will be refreshing to be on the other side – to participate rather than to lead. More than that, it will be a great opportunity to learn about a way of working that has been popular in the UK for many years, but, as I think I’ll find out this week, is not the same as its US counterpart.

The training is part of an ambitious programme of work being led by one of the biggest child welfare foundations in the US – the Annie E Casey Foundation. They are looking to advance the field of evidence-based programmes (EBPs). As a foundation that funds programme evaluation as well as system reform, they well know that most children’s services systems do not use EBPs and that EBPs are not generally designed with systems in mind. They are looking to develop ways that help communities and systems to implement programs and maintain them - and to do it on a grand scale.

Part of how they'll do this is by developing a model. They have no intention of re-inventing the wheel. Instead, with the blessing and help of developers, they want to combine the best bits of existing models – the two in question being Dartington’s Common Language, and Hawkins and Catalano’s Communities that Care.

We started the process when Michael Little and I showed Common Language to a group of 20 (a mix of AECF staff and representatives of CtC). This is the return leg: CtC get to show and we get to participate.

CtC has many strengths. It has a long track record – first used in the late 1980s. It works ‘from the bottom up’ by bringing together all those with a stake in the community to agree how best to improve the lives of its children. It provides a way for these conversations to happen – a step-by-step method and a common language. It uses data about children to inform what happens to those children, fostering a strong sense of ownership.

It has a strong theoretical foundation and it is grounded in robust evidence. Not only does the method encourage communities to invest their resources in activities that have been proven to work, it has been shown to add value over and above that of the programmes it endorses.

It appears to work best at the community level and as I understand it, outside of the children’s services system. CtC aims to promote positive development and prevent unhealthy behaviours (violence, substance use, teen pregnancy etc) - it is a prevention system. In the US, I don’t think the statutory system – with the exception of schools – is there to prevent poor outcomes, rather to respond when they happen. Which leads me to wonder whether CtC is compatible with child welfare systems.

I’m also curious to know whether the model is better suited to particular communities. Does it work where there is universal poverty and serious levels of community dysfunction? Or does it better suit motivated communities already mobilising their resources?

Although the model is concerned with partnership and getting all the stakeholders round the table, every process has to be led or at least initiated, and usually needs some funding. Does it matter who initiates the process? Are partnerships more successful when led or at least backed by the superintendant of schools or are the police the pivotal stakeholders? Does it matter where the money comes from?

The booklet provides an optimal timeline, suggesting that it can take as little as nine months from first conversation to getting the first programme up and running. But what degree of variation is there? And how often do communities lose momentum before they get to implement their selected programmes? In the UK, many settings gathered large amounts of data on risk and protective factors but struggled to use the data to shape and implement a strategy.

The model is concerned with introducing new programmes, which usually means there is a need for extra money. A more sustainable way of working draws funds away from existing services that do not work or are no longer needed. I hope the model will suggest ways of decommissioning activity to free up resources for prevention activity.

And so it is with these questions and many more that I embark on my training. I look forward to being part of the debate