In the current policy, commissioning and delivery environments for services aimed at improving the lives of children and their families, increasing priority is placed on the ability to measure and demonstrate the effectiveness of social welfare intervention. This is particularly acute for voluntary sector services that increasingly provide services on behalf of local authorities and operate in a highly competitive environment in which the ability to demonstrate effectiveness and value for money can ultimately determine survival. However, social welfare intervention is delivered in the context of complex social systems in which a multiplicity of factors interplay between those individuals who are managing, providing and using social services. This complexity presents significant methodological challenges in terms of understanding the effect of intervention on individuals’ lives. Often the pressures to produce highly aggregated data about outcomes mean that the experience and the voice of those using services is overlooked and the connection between data and lived experience is lost. This thesis describes the evaluation of an approach to measuring outcomes known as Goal Attainment Scaling (GAS). This places the service user at the heart of measuring outcomes whilst collecting data that can be used to evaluate effectiveness within a service, or comparatively between services, or between service user groups. The approach was implemented with practitioners and young people within the context of a leaving care support service provided by a voluntary sector service. The GAS implementation was evaluated using a realist research strategy in order to understand the ways in which a complex policy and operating environment interplayed with the challenging contexts of transition for young people and their heterogeneous pathways in leaving care. For a variety of reasons, explained within this thesis, participation levels in the trial were low and therefore quantitative data regarding outcomes was too limited to be conclusive. Nevertheless the study represents a useful pilot of this approach and highlights the importance of context in determining results when introducing new approaches to outcomes measurement into practice environments. The findings that emerge from the evaluation betray a concerning picture of the pressures and constraints on practice experienced by a large leaving care service in the current climate of cuts to local authority funding and statutory services. As opposed to being an independent or somewhat removed undertaking, this study was concerned to frame ‘evaluation’ and ‘outcomes measurement’ as participatory and reflexive activities that should be embedded within service delivery. By so doing, it aimed to facilitate reciprocal or ‘bi-directional’ learning between providers and the users of services to underpin interventions, particularly with vulnerable populations of service users. Given that the support provided by leaving care services may represent the last intervention before young people disappear from the system’s view, this is particularly significant in supporting them to develop agency and self-determination to take them through the often compressed and accelerated journeys that characterise adolescence for this group.

People effectiveness has become a key differentiator of competitive advantage in the knowledge economy and the need for a valid and reliable measure of people effectiveneness has become paramount for success. The research positions the psychological work immersion scale (PWIS) as a relevant measure of people effectiveness and explores the relationship between the PWIS variables (psychological attachment and people effectiveness enablers) and perceptions of business performance. Furthermore the research explores whether higher levels of psychological work immersion leads to increased business performance over time in an attempt to position the value of organisational development interventions aimed at increasing psychological work immersion levels in the work place. The setting for this research was a not-for-profit organisation in South Africa. The sample for the study was measured at two defined points in time over a 14-month period and consisted of n = 414 (T1) and n = 551 (T2). The study showed that the PWIS factor structure is a valid measure of the psychological work immersion construct across time (T1 and T2). The results provided evidence of convergent, intra-discriminant and external discriminant validity (construct validity) of the PWIS within (T1 and T2) and over time (T1 vs T2). The results showed that the PWIS has acceptable internal consistency reliability within and across time (T1 and T2) as well as demonstrating test-retest reliability across time. The results provided evidence that the people effectiveness enablers and psychological attachment variables significantly predict perception of business performance indicators (profit/loss, costs, and cash flow related to operating activities), and that strong perceptions of people effectiveness enablers relate to strong individual perceptions of business performance through a high sense of psychological attachment. The mediation results confirmed the test-retest reliability and validity of the PWIS in predicting perceptions of business performance within and over time. This finding shows that psychological attachment is an important factor in terms of iv influencing the individual perceptions of business performance which is related to improvements in actual business performance. The study also showed evidence of a positive relationship between psychological work immersion and business performance and demonstrated improvements in psychological work immersion coincided with year on year improvements in business performance. The study contributes towards the current literature on organisational development and specifically on the measurement of people effectiveness within knowledge economy organisations. / Industrial and Organisational Psychology / D. Com.