EWC project: Gendered Wellbeing Assessment: Pilot and Validation
Research type
Research Study
Full title
The Effectiveness of Women’s Centres in England and Wales project: Gendered Wellbeing Assessment: Pilot and Validation study
IRAS ID
354762
Contact name
Simon Pemberton
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Birmingham
Duration of Study in the UK
3 years, 0 months, 1 days
Research summary
Women’s Centres in the UK are third sector organisations that provide practical and emotional support to women with complex needs. These women tend to be underserved by, or frequently disengage from statutory services that are often ill equipped to meet their needs (Johnson et al., 2022). Whilst implementing the Women’s Risk Needs Assessment, a trauma-informed and gender responsive assessment tool, allowing for the accurate risk categorisation of criminal justice involved women, in UK centres between 2021 and 2022, it became apparent that no equivalent assessment framework exists for their non-offending counterparts. As a result, assessment providers utilise various tools, unvalidated questions and questionnaires across different domains, e.g. Domestic Abuse and Mental Health. They do so, however, often without assessing the interaction effects between needs to identify specific vulnerabilities or potential factors that affect the acuity or severity of these needs. Furthermore, tools are largely not gender-focussed, utilised in the most efficient way, or validated, thus their legitimacy can be called into question in multi-agency approaches, leading to duplication and overassessment. The task undertaken here seeks to provide an accurate assessment for women with complex needs, that might facilitate early intervention to prevent future harms and enables informed multi-agency partnership working.
The Gendered Wellbeing Assessment (GWA) is a comprehensive trauma-informed quality of life assessment, suitable for women with complex needs, without current criminal justice involvement. The GWA measures the skills, strengths, and resources of women, to lay the foundation in supporting them to lead a safe, healthy, and fulfilling life of their own choosing. This study will test the measurement accuracy of each scale of the GWA, how the tool works for different population groups, and how accurately the tool predicts the risk of identified adverse life events.
REC name
East Midlands - Leicester South Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
25/EM/0163
Date of REC Opinion
11 Sep 2025
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion