Introduction
A central concern of every human being, from time immemorial, has been the preservation of his/her self-esteem. One of the fundamental reasons for people to become violent, rebellious, and revolutionary can be found as the damage on self-esteem and there is a greater possibility for the destitute or the homeless to be affected by the loss of self-esteem. An agency which provides services to the homeless has been “The Ready Willing & Able” The John Doe Fund, Inc. and an evaluation of its programs in building up the self-esteem of the homeless is carried out in this research paper.
Agency and Program Description
Founded by George McDonald more than fifteen years ago, at a time when the homeless crisis of New York City was starting to peak, Ready, Willing & Able has contributed remarkably to the remedial measures of the issues related with the homeless. The mission statement of the program indicates the central role played by the agency to the welfare of the society. “The Doe Fund’s mission is to develop and implement cost-effective, holistic programs that meet the needs of a diverse population working to break the cycles of homelessness, addiction, and criminal recidivism. All of The Doe Fund’s programs and innovative business ventures ultimately strive to help homeless and formerly incarcerated individuals achieve permanent self-sufficiency.” (Mission Statement).
There have been serious challenges to the program conceived and implemented for the cause of the society. However, the success of the program suggests all those great efforts taken for the effective implementation of the program. An evaluation of the program would definitely point out that it provided just the same as what the society would ultimately expect from such a program. The program provided its beneficiaries with comfortable beds in semi-private rooms, healthy, hearty meals etc. “As the program developed, there were caseworkers on staff, nightly 12-step meetings, life skills classes, and certified teachers to help those who needed them earn high school equivalency diplomas or, in some cases, to learn to read and write. What George McDonald had known all along proved powerfully true: “Work works.” By 1994, 90 formerly homeless and drug-addicted men had entered the legitimate workforce. They were staying clean, doing their jobs diligently and well, paying rent, saving money, repairing old relationships and forging new ones and looking to the future.” (Carol Tannenhauser, Our History, The Doe Fund).
Goal for the Program
The fundamental goal of the program essentially clarifies the scope and relevance of the same. Therefore, the most prominent goal of the program has been to provide life-changing opportunities to homeless individuals through paid work, transitional housing and comprehensive support services which will help New York be a cleaner, safer, more humane place for everyone while helping individuals rebuild their own life and boost their self-esteems. This is an indispensable goal set for the achievement of significant social advantages.
Program Objective
It is essential to have clear-cut program objectives that assist in the evaluation of the program goal and one of the pertinent objectives of the program has been as follows. Thus, a primary objective of the program is to increase self-esteem among the homeless population that graduates from the program. The designated performance standard for this objective is that 70% of participating clients will increase their level of self-esteem by 30%.
Description of Intervention
One of the chief components of the Doe Fund is the After-Care Department which supports program graduates in their efforts to transition successfully into mainstream society. Significantly, the Department meets with graduates twice a month, visits their homes and places of employment, serves as a liaison to new employers, and supervises monthly peer support counseling sessions. The participants need to secure a full-time job, private housing and achieve a drug and alcohol-free lifestyle in order to graduate from the Department and the average length of stay there will be 10 months and no longer than 18 months.
The After-Care program is attended by all the recent graduates of the Ready, Willing & Able program and its structure of functioning is intended in a way to support graduates as they begin to work and to maintain temperance and be successful in their new employment positions. “After-Care’s follow-up services are ongoing as graduates are encouraged to remain in contact with program staff and avail themselves of any help or resources, be it GED classes or resume writing, which Ready, Willing & Able can offer.” (Ready, Willing & Able, After-Care, The Doe Fund) The comparison group of the intervention is those homeless who barely come to the program and those who just started the program. Thus, the intervention has been structured to test the self-esteem of the homeless and the implementation of the program helped in this process.
A Qualitative Question
The qualitative question that has been the most instrumental in the evaluation of the self-esteem of the participants who were homeless was: “describe what has been most supportive to you to think, more than ever, highly of you over the past 30 days.” Such a qualitative question would definitely make the participant think of his/her attitude towards the self and rate the self-esteem accordingly.
A Quantitative Measure
The testing of the level of self-esteem among the homeless has been found necessary in order to find if the performance standard was cleared. For this purpose, Self-Esteem Rating Scale (SERS) which measures self-esteem was found useful. The SERS, as suggested by William R Nugent and Janita W Thomas (1993), is a 40 item instrument that provides clinical measure of self-esteem that can indicate the problems in self-esteem as we as the positive or non-problematic levels. These items, which are listed in the appendix, were written to tap into a range of areas of self-evaluation which includes overall self-worth, social competence, problem-solving ability, intellectual ability, self-competence, and worth relative to other people.
It is a very useful instrument that measures positive as well as negative aspects of self-esteem in clinical practice. This is found to be an effective tool for measuring the objective which is to improve the independent living skills of the homeless population that graduates from the program. The Self-Esteem Rating Scale was rated as having good content, construct validity, and factorial validity. (Nugent, W. R., and Thomas J. W. (1993). Validation of the Self-Esteem Rating Scale, Research on Social Work Practice, 3, 191-207). The questionnaire for the evaluation, as indicated in the appendix, is intended to measure what one feels about oneself and, as it is not a test as such, there are no wrong answers. Each of the questions is answered with care and accuracy which indicates the self-esteem of the person.
Research Design
The research design is one of the central elements of any evaluation of this kind and the selection of the research design has been very appropriate to the purpose of study. Thus, the method chosen for this study has been a quasi-experimental pre and post-test non-equivalent control group design. Participants comprised two non-random groups, the intervention group, i.e. those participating in the support group and the comparison group, i.e. those not participating in the support group. That means the design has been such that one group received a pretest, intervention, and then a posttest, while the other group received only a pre and post-test. The intervention has been intended to discover the effects a self-esteem group has on the self-esteem of the homeless. Therefore, the dependant variable of this research has been the level of self-esteem, whereas the independent variable is the self-esteem group sessions. The selection of the group members and those in the comparison group was from those homeless who did not enjoy high self-esteem in the course of the graduation. The intervention group was assigned according to the needs of the participants and great attention was taken to minimize the chances of any type of problems in the selection.
The comparison group consisted of those who attended the graduation program very late or those who never attended and this selection provided the best possible comparison group that renders to the result validity of the research. Once the selection was carried out efficiently, the group was formed officially by the crisis counselor who announced the group members. They were given opportunity to participate in the group, and the potential participants in both the intervention group and comparison group informed consent forms. The participants in both the intervention group and the comparison group were given an informed consent form which explained possible risks, possible gains, confidentiality, and the ability to withdraw from the study at any time. The consent form also explained that if the client did not wish to participate in the study but would still like to be a part of the group he/she could choose to be so, although none declined to participate in the study. They were also informed verbally and in the forms that while the information attained in the study may become public domain, the names of participants would be kept completely confidential. Thus, every possible risk in the research was looked into and steps were taken to reduce the level of risk. In this way the research was designed in the most appropriate manner.
Data Collection Procedure and Analysis.
References
Mission Statement. (2008). About us. BBB. The Doe Fund. Web.