Current View

• Research type

  Research Study

• Full title

  How do professionals make decisions when using the Current View Tool?

• IRAS ID

  196530

• Contact name

  Peter Martin

• Contact email

  peter.martin@annafreud.org

• Sponsor organisation

  University College London

• Clinicaltrials.gov Identifier

  15/0977, R&D number

• Duration of Study in the UK

  0 years, 3 months, 14 days

• Research summary

  This project aims to understand how professionals working in CAMHS (Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services) decide on ratings they make using the Current View Tool. The Current View tool is a one page snapshot data collection measure for use during assessment, or when the professional understanding of a child or young person’s (CYP) situation changes. Professionals rate a CYP’s presenting problems, complexity factors and contextual problems. The

  Current view tool is already widely in use and part of the CAMHS minimum dataset.

  For the form to achieve its purpose, it is important that CAMHS professionals are able give accurate and reliable ratings. Currently, there is no published research that investigates whether this is the case. This research project will investigate the thought process behind professionals’ ratings. This insight will be achieved by interviewing professionals as they fill in the form using information contained in several case vignettes. Case vignettes are fictional cases of a child or adolescent experiencing mental health difficulties and should approximate genuine cases. The type of interview method to be used in this study is cognitive interviewing (Willis, 2005) Cognitive interviewing was originally developed to improve survey design. One type of cognitive interviewing asks participants to ‘think aloud’ as they respond to questions; in addition, participants are prompted as appropriate. This allows the researcher to gain insight into CAMHS professionals’ understanding of the form and its associated guidance. For example, it has been previously identified that different professionals differ in the way they use the response options ‘none and ‘not known’ in relation to symptoms specified on the Current View Form. This project is designed to elucidate such issues, in order to inform potential changes to the form or its associated training materials that would help collect more accurate and reliable data about CAMHS service users.

• REC name

  N/A

• REC reference

  N/A