Community Needs Assessment in Human Services
In this work, domestic violence seems like a critical community issue that necessitates assessment. According to Centres of Disease Control, one in four women and one in ten men have experienced a form of domestic violence (“Prevent Domestic Violence,” 2020). There are seven feasible steps to conduct a community needs assessment in domestic violence.
Step One: Organizing and Engaging Partners
This entails bringing together people, organizations, and agencies with the same interest in the community issue. For instance, the State Department on the Status of Women is a government body critical in assessing domestic violence.
Step Two: visioning
Visioning is the collaborative development of a shared vision, values, and objectives for all participants’ assessments. Maintaining a focus on domestic violence needs a vision statement, which offers a mechanism to assess only the relevant issue (Mizoguchi et al., 2004).
Step Three: Collecting Data
Data collection entails collecting information about domestic violence’s current state and identifying the gaps to prioritize the needs assessment. According to Mizoguchi et al. (2004), data collection can be done through focus groups, surveys, or in-depth interviews.
Step Four: Identifying and Prioritizing Strategic Issues
This entails finding one or few significant issues that the assessment need will focus on. Data collected in step four enable identifying where significant gaps exist.
Step Five: Identifying Community Assets
A community asset is anything that has utility in the improvement of a community need. They can be people, structural places, community programs, and existing policies that help mitigate domestic violence.
Step Six: Developing an Action Plan
An action plan is a detailed plan with specific goals and objectives that must be met in overcoming the community need. Kirk et al. (2017) contends that developing an action plan utilized and precedes data collection and analysis to make a strategic plan for approaching the community need.
Step Seven: Taking the Action Plan
This entails implementing the strategies developed in step six and working towards the goals and objectives for overcoming the community need. This is likely to be a continuous or one-time implementation process.
References
Kirk, C., Johnson-Hakim, S., Anglin, A., & Connelly, C. (2017). Putting the Community back into Community Health Needs Assessments: Maximizing Partnerships Via Community-Based Participatory Research. Progress In Community Health Partnerships: Research, Education, And Action, 11(2), 167-173. https://doi.org/10.1353/cpr.2017.0021
Mizoguchi, N., Luluquisen, M., Witt, S., & Maker, L. (2004). A Handbook for Participatory Community Assessments (1st ed.). Alameda County Public Health Department.
Prevent Domestic Violence. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2020). Retrieved 24 February 2021, from https://www.cdc.gov/injury/features/intimate-partner-violence/index.html#:~:text=About%201%20in%204%20women,being%20concerned%20for%20their%20safety).