Using Plan-Do-Study-Act and Participatory Action Research to Improve Use of Risk Needs Assessments

ABSTRACT

Many community supervision agencies use a risk/need assessment tool (RNA) to assess client risk level, inform case planning decisions, and allocate supervision resources. Research suggests agencies do not always implement RNA tools as intended, without offering practitioners solutions for improving these implementation concerns. Using a participatory action research framework, this case study highlights one probation office's efforts to improve their RNA fidelity concerns by using Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA), a data driven problem-solving strategy. Findings show increases in officer knowledge and comfort using the RNA, while revealing gaps in training, dissemination, and the underlying premise for the tool in practice. Results offer guidance for researchers and practitioners in developing collaborative and problem-solving research agendas to enhance the fidelity of evidence-based practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Participatory action research
• fidelity
• implementation science
• quality improvement
• PDSA
• risk and need assessment
• community corrections

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank Teneshia Thurman and Kimberly Meyer for their contributions to collecting data and collaborating throughout the process. The authors would also like to thank Heather Toronjo for her willingness and keen eye to always offer fresh and constructive feedback to early drafts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Evidence-informed practices lean toward an “evidence-base” but may not have enough rigorous scientific evidence to garner the EBP label yet.

2. Bayhill Post is a pseudonym to protect confidentiality of participants.

3. In prior PAR projects, the VADOC developed scoring instrument with ACE! researchers by using the literature on EBP/EIPs to outline the component parts of what each measured skill should look like in practice. Rubric scores include 0 (missed opportunity to use skill), 1 (insufficient use of skill), 2 (satisfactory use of skill), and 3 (proficient use of skill).

4. This report did not include statistical significance testing for two main reasons. First, the sample lacks sufficient power to conduct significance testing. Secondly, and most importantly, during future iterations of PDSA that do not include researchers, local POs and their managers do not have access to software packages to conduct significance tests on their own.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Virginia Department of Corrections [VADOC 16 044].