Evaluation in the field of social services for minors: Measuring the efficacy of interventions in the Italian service for health protection and promotion

- The practices to develop efficacy in the social field are still limited, particularly in the field of Child Protection.
- This work presents the methodology used to evaluate the efficacy of one intervention addressed to minors: MADIT.
- The efficacy evaluation can open new opportunities for professionals who deal with health in the social field.
- We show the importance of evaluating the effectiveness of interventions with the minors in order to increase the quality of services.
- We wanted to create the conditions so that an efficacy evaluation system could be extended to other fields of social intervention.

This article presents the availment of a new Methodology for the efficacy evaluation of interventions in the field of social science: the Method of Computerized Textual Data Analysis (M.A.D.I.T.). In the beginning, we present some elements of the international and Italian legislation referred to the efficacy evaluation and about the child protection. Subsequently this work describes the process of efficacy evaluation of an intervention of minor protection delivered by a public Italian Service, the Minor and Family Service, MiFa. The MADIT Methodology is applied to the efficacy evaluation and it is interested in discursive repertoires, defined as “a linguistically intended mode of construction of finite reality”. The aim of the research is to show, through the description of every step of the implementation of the Methodology based on text analysis, how is possible to notice if there are progress in the direction of the objective of intervention of child protection. The results describes how from a starting situation of “first appearance of psychiatric career” referred to the minor, the work of the psychologist of the Service MiFa has enabled to produce a shifting in the direction of objective of the intervention, that was “developing the competence of the minor to identify objectives". Through this work, we show how a rigorous methodology for assessing effectiveness may contribute to improve the quality of service of Minor Protection and may also be suitable for new fields of social science.