School social work evaluation project

The research project on the evaluation of school social work deals with the question of what contribution school social work makes to achieving the goals of the education and participation package. In order to do justice to the complex and very multi-layered field of school social work, we have developed various research instruments that will be used in the coming months.

The triangulative research design, in which both qualitative and quantitative methods are used, aims to turn those affected by the evaluation into participants in the evaluation.

On the one hand, we are working with an online questionnaire for teachers, school management, school social workers and parents.

On the other hand, we conduct guided interviews with school principals and school social workers. A so-called proportionally stratified sample is drawn in advance for this purpose. This means that not all school social workers and head teachers are interviewed, but only a randomly selected sample.

As a further supplement, the school social workers receive work tasks on the topic of "internal and external networking" as well as on their current personal focal points. This data is used to supplement the information obtained from the interviews and questionnaires.

As a further component of the comprehensive evaluation of school social work, we analyze the data from the social statistics of the Dortmund Social Welfare Office in order to identify any correlations between the number of applications and the existence of school social work at schools.