Measuring Competence in Systemic Practice: Development of the ‘Systemic Family Practice – Systemic Competency Scale’ (SPS)

Catherine Butler; Elizabeth Sheils; Trish Joscelyne; Judith Lask; Helen Pote; Jon Crossley

doi:10.1111/1467-6427.12251

Measuring Competence in Systemic Practice: Development of the ‘Systemic Family Practice – Systemic Competency Scale’ (SPS)

Catherine Butler, Elizabeth Sheils, Trish Joscelyne, Judith Lask, Helen Pote, Jon Crossley

Department of Psychology

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

6 Citations (SciVal)

144 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Ensuring that practitioners are competent in the therapies they deliver is important for training, therapeutic outcomes and ethical practice. The development of the Systemic Practice Scale (SPS) is reported – a measure to assess the competence of students as trialed by Children and Young Person's Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (CYP-IAPT) training courses. Initial reliability assessment of the SPS with twenty-eight supervisors of systemic practice evaluating students’ competence using an online recording of a family therapy session is detailed. The SPS was found to be a reliable measure of systemic competence across training settings. Rating variability was noted, with training and benchmarking to improve rating consistency recommended. Further research using the SPS to further establish the reliability and validity of the scale is required. Practitioner points: SPS represents an important tool, particularly for the supervision and development of more junior staff or students Initial reliability for use of the SPS as a formative tool has been established. Further benchmarking is required if using the tool in a summative manner.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	79-99
Number of pages	21
Journal	Journal of Family Therapy
Volume	42
Issue number	1
Early online date	25 Oct 2018
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-6427.12251
Publication status	Published - 1 Feb 2020

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
This project, therefore, aimed to assess the reliability of the Systemic Practice Scale (SPS) and also assessed the possibility of the scale being useful for other courses, particularly in the training of Clinical Psychologists in the UK. The project was funded by the Division of Clinical Psychology, British Psychological Society. A significant challenge during this research study was recruitment. The original design was to recruit via the DClinPsy supervisors? mailing list of the research team, fifteen systemic intermediate training courses and all CYP-IAPT courses. Due to minimal responses the Association of Family Therapy (AFT) sent information about the research to their mailing list and an announcement was made at the Annual AFT conference. Despite interest from fifty-eight individuals, only twenty-eight completed the research. Thus, funding and pragmatic constraints of this research project meant that the data collection phase was shorter than ideal and included a wider variation of training and experience with the SPS than originally planned. Future research would benefit from engaging multiple training centres over a longer period of time to increase the sample size and representativeness of the sample. With a larger sample, further analysis could explore if the scale was used differently by assessors with different qualifications and experience.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 The Association for Family Therapy and Systemic Practice

Keywords

assessment
competence
systemic practice
training

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Social Psychology
Clinical Psychology
Social Sciences (miscellaneous)

Access to Document

10.1111/1467-6427.12251

SPS_paper_absolute_final.PDF
This is the peer-reviewed version of the following article: Butler, C, Sheils, E, Joscelyne, T, Lask, J, Pote, H & Crossley, J 2018, 'Measuring Competence in Systemic Practice: Development of the ‘Systemic Family Practice – Systemic Competency Scale’ (SPS)' Journal of Family Therapy, which has been published in final form at: https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-6427.12251. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving.
Accepted author manuscript, 750 KB

Cite this

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Measuring Competence in Systemic Practice: Development of the ‘Systemic Family Practice – Systemic Competency Scale’ (SPS)

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Access to Document

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Catherine Butler, Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy

Cite this

Measuring Competence in Systemic Practice: Development of the ‘Systemic Family Practice – Systemic Competency Scale’ (SPS)

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Access to Document

Other files and links

Fingerprint

Profiles

Catherine Butler, Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy

Cite this