Abstract
The study described here tries lo test empirically the assumption that client participation in community-social work intervention leads to improved outputs. Two hundred senior communitycentre staff were asked about their practices and means of client participation. and about the outputs of the community centres intrinsic, press outputs, extrinsic, goal attainment outputs and economic outputs. It was found that most of the measures of client participation predicted the types of outputs at a moderate to high level, and, together, explained about a fifth of the variancein each type of output. The study suggests that client participation is not only a value of community-social work, but contributes to its effectiveness and success.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 85-98 |
| Number of pages | 14 |
| Journal | Journal of Social Service Research |
| Volume | 19 |
| Issue number | 1-2 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 21 Jul 1994 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:The research described in this paper was carried out in the summer of 1988. Two hundred senior community centre professional workers (managers or division directors) in sixty-nine-community centres throughout Israel filled in questionnaires administered to them by fifteen interviewers (themselves senior community centre professional workers). The Israeli community centres are public bodies, supported by municipal funding, the Ministry of Education and the payment of their clients. Client participation is part of the community centre doctrine, and almost all centres have boards of management which include representatives of the public. (See Yanay, 1988, for a description and analysis of Israeli community centres.) The professional, educational and demographic characteristics of the respondents are in Table 1. Most are managers of community centres or division directors, young, with moderate experience, living quite near the community centre, with partid university train- ing. None of these characteristics (or others, for example, marital status, university specialization, continuing education) had any significant effect on either the dependent variable (effectiveness) or the independent variable (client participation).