Client-oriented Quality Assessment within Municipal Social Services

The hypothesis of this article is that quality assessment, despite the fact that it has now become a part of social services, has largely occurred without taking clients into consideration. There are supposed to be at least three possible explanations for this: organizational structures and professionalism, the difficulty in defining client needs, and the opinion that a client is not an equal companion in social service organizations. The research method entailed a questionnaire which was sent to 60 managers working within municipal social administration during the periods of construction (1950–1965), supplementation (1966–1983) and reform and redistribution (1984 onwards) of the Finnish welfare state and a questionnaire for 146 public social welfare organizations in Finland. Fewer than 30% of the social managers of the construction (1950–1965) and supplementation (1966–1983) periods and fewer than 50% of the managers of the last period (1984 onwards) said that clients really had assessed quality. The needs of clients and client feedback were said to be important during all three periods but the managers did not include them in the most important tasks. The managers of the period of supplementation did this the least. The managers from the period of reform and redistribution (1984 onwards) were more likely to trust the ability of clients to assess quality of social services and they also gave more opportunities to do so. The most important reasons for neglecting client needs and feedback in quality assessment were organizational structures and difficulties in defining client needs. There also seem to have been some methodological difficulties in assessing social services. Statistics are still largely in use and concrete criteria related to quality are missing. More specific questionnaires, cross-experimental designs and interviews, more possibilities for clients to describe needs in their own words, and the specification of general concepts in more concrete terms of quality are needed in order to avoid abstract and general assessments.