Needs Assessment - Conducting A Community Level Needs Assessment

Conducting A Community Level Needs Assessment

According to Sharma, Lanum and Saurez-Balcazar (2000) “the goals of a 'needs assessment' is to identify the assets of a community and determine potential concerns that it faces” (p. 1). A needs assessment therefore becomes crucial in the initial stages of an intervention. A needs analysis is focused on identifying the possible barriers to successful program intervention in a community and possibly finding solutions to these challenges. Service providers in Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) work are also concerned with assessment and provision of services to different stakeholders. Such services may include an assessment closely related to a needs assessment that focuses on whether current services are effective or not, and if not, identifying the gaps in implementation; or an assessment of whether potential services are likely to be effective once they have been implemented (Rossi, Lipsey & Freeman, 2004). These assessments highlight the close relationship between needs assessment, monitoring, and evaluation; while each applies similar tools, each also has independent objectives and requires unique skills.

In community development work practitioners are concerned with identifying barriers that stand in the ways of positive community progress. In many cases, an organization or community is faced by challenges with regards to some social issue, provision or access to services and it is the job of the practitioner, in consultation with stakeholders, to decide about how best to go about finding helpful interventions and implementing solutions to this.

A community level needs assessment is beneficial and crucial to any planned intervention on behalf of communities facing difficulties with regard to some community issue. A community level needs assessment will assist the practitioner to determine the nature and scope of a problem at which an intervention might be aimed, with the aim of finding out what possible interventions might be successful in alleviating the problem (Rossi, Lipsey & Freeman, 2004). A community needs assessment will also uncover which members of the community are most likely to benefit from a planned intervention and who might not be. Community level needs assessment will also give direction to planners in terms of where resources need to be allocated for the intervention so that they are not wasted. Community level needs assessments should include the community at all stages of planning, and should consider all people that might be affected by the planned intervention, including children, the elderly and the mentally ill.

Tools for an effective CLNA project

There are a number of components in a community level needs assessment, all of which are aimed at gathering data that will answer what the practitioner needs to know and inform the decisions that he or she makes. According to the National Consumer Supporter Technical Assistance Center (www.ncstac.org.) the following are crucial components of a community level needs assessment.

Assessment

Community demographics:

Community demographics assist the practitioner to get a feel of the field that they are working in. Demographics include things like age ranges, the number of people living in a certain area within the community, the number or percentage of people within a certain socio economic status and gender characteristics <"www.ncstac.org">/. Demographic information about certain population groups can be found online at such official websites as www.statssa.gov in South Africa.

Consumer leadership

Consumer leadership assessment is an assessment of the frequency with which community members use or are likely to use an existing or planned service . This assessment is meant to give an indication of the need for the existing or proposed intervention or service. Consumer leadership assessment is meant to give an indication of the different types of leadership activities and roles that are related to transformation in relation to some health or social issue that is being addressed. This may give an indication as to the degree of the need for an intervention or not.

Service gaps

An assessment of service gaps is meant to give an indication of the types of services that are needed the most at the particular point of time in which the assessment is being conducted (www.ncstac.org). A scale measuring the availability, accessibility, provider choice and cultural responsiveness of services, rated on a scale from 0-no availability/non-existent, to 3-outstanding and responsive is provided by the National Consumer Supporter Technical Assistance Center. The scale also assesses the availability of other services in the community such as support groups, education and employment services that may be of interest to the practitioner.

Methodology and data collection: how to get information for the assessment

The following are the actual tools that can be involved in the process of gathering data to be used in the community needs assessment.

Community/Social Survey

Surveys can be used especially in relation to the gathering of community demographics where a large number of people may be involved, and also in which multiple variables such socio-economic status, education levels and employment are being measured in relation to the planned intervention. Large scale surveys involving many people can reveal useful information, while smaller surveys may be less generalizable and used only in the context within which they are conducted. Survey design will vary depending on context, such as internet and phone surveys for well resourced communities or face to face surveys for less resourced communities.

Community mapping

Often, a practitioner may be wanting to implement a service that they think will be of benefit to the community. The problem facing the practitioner will be where and how to place the service at a particular point in the community, and whether that service is likely to be used. Community mapping is where the practitioner gets people in the community to draw a map of the community of the places that they visit the most and how often they go there. This will give an indication of where to locate a service so that it is conveniently placed and accessible to community participants whom it is intended to service. The problem may arise where there are differences between the places that people visit.

Seasonal calendar

A seasonal calendar allows the practitioner to look at seasonal trends that may affect the use or implementation of a service in a community<"www.rotary.org">http://www.rotary.org/ridocuments/en_pdf/605c_en.pdf. Seasonal trends may reveal decreases in the supply of labour, periods of hunger that may affect for example school children’s performance at school and so on. Seasonal calendars may reveal important reasons for the gaps between service utilization and intervention outcomes. This will allow the practitioner to plan for other things that may not have been considered as part of the intervention but which will greatly improve the quality of the intervention and make life better for the community members. To use the seasonal calendar as a data collection tool, the practitioner gets community members to write a list of the things that they have to do throughout the year. These things are related to work, cultural activities, certain times of the year in which participants are unavailable at all and so on, and to plot how they share them with other members of the community.

Focus group sessions

Focus groups are sessions in which community members can answer questions about different aspects of the intervention in the form of planned discussions. This is a good opportunity to actually find out about the needs and concerns of the community. It is also a good opportunity for addressing service gaps and what needs to be done about them.