Évaluation des besoins d’informations des intervenants en protection de la jeunesse

Knowledge transfer (KT) is an expanding academic field that includes the study of activities, mechanisms, and processes leading workers, such as staff member performing psychosocial interventions at the department of youth protection (DYP), to adequately use knowledge whether it is empirical or tacit. The purpose of this study is to foster more efficiency in linear written tools of KT (e.g.: academic journals, publications, and websites) by identifying more adequately the needs of DYP workers. Our first goal is to qualitatively determine categories of needs that can be investigated quantitatively. Second, using statistical methods, we seek to validate the categories resulting from qualitative investigation. A third goal is to determine if other factors might influence these needs. In this study, two other factors have been investigated: work experience and department affiliation (i.e.: childhood services or adolescence services). To investigate these three objectives, we developed a 2-Step sequential exploratory mixed model. In the qualitative phase, we conducted a content analysis on a single open-question administrated to three different work teams as well as a document summarizing the request formulated to the DYP’s library. The results shed light on the first objective of this memoir: identifying if the needs of field workers in psychosocial intervention could be classified by type. Our analysis produced a thematic tree comprising 2 greater categories: needs related to the steps in intervention and needs related intervention itself. The category of needs related to intervention itself can be divided in 3 sub-categories: Needs related to intervention on the child/adolescent; Needs related to intervening on his environment; and Need related to intervention on the greater sociocultural context. Moreover, a more in-depth analysis produced up to 42 factors distributed in these 2 broader categories. Secondly, 82 participants filled out an electronic administrated questionnaire based on the previous categories identified. To analyze these data, we performed an ANOVA and a MANOVA to reach our second objective: determine the intensity of each categories identified in the qualitative phase. The needs identified were summed up in 16 groups and were classified in decreasing order: 9 groups of high-level needs (animation, individual characteristics of children/adolescents, characteristics of their parents, parent-child relationships, intercultural intervention, and social problems) and 7 low-level needs (other steps of intervention and professional services). The results indicate that the needs of DWP staff working in psychosocial intervention are mainly centered on their mandate, their clinical practice, and the clinical problems they face. Finally, we met our third objective: determine if the identified need vary according to work experience or department affiliation. Our results suggest that department affiliation is not significantly associated with needs in KT. However, in our analyses, experience (10 years or less and more than 10) was significantly associated with differences in KT needs. These differences are discussed in the result section and explanatory hypothesis such as the accumulation of knowledge due to work experience or cognitive changes related to expertise are formulated. The discussion contextualizes our result by comparing them to other needs identified and other characteristics of knowledge that should be took into consideration. Recommendations based on our results are formulated to foster better efficiency in written documents designed for professional in psychosocial intervention and to explore further more KT. Notwithstanding certain limitations, these results pave the way to developing better KT assessment tool as well as better implementation of KT techniques in written tools to enhance their use and efficiency.

Keyphrases: Intervention, Mixed model, Knowledge transfer, Expressed need