What is "Quality in Practice"?
A few words about a two-year Project
The basic idea of the project ‘Quality in Practice: Stakeholders' View of Supported Employment (SE) Initiatives’ was that the impact of Supported Employment depends on functioning partnerships between the different stakeholders in this process:
Organisations from countries with different levels of development of SE were invited to participate in the two-year project (funded by the Leonardo Programme of the European Commission): Two EU Member Countries (Austria, United Kingdom), two Accession countries (Czech Republic, Hungary) as well as Norway became partners in the QUIP project. Spain joined the international team at a later stage as an associated partner.
The main aims of QUIP were:
At the core of all these objectives was the main target of defining relevant quality criteria in Supported Employment from the point of view of the different stakeholders.
To achieve this, a variety of research methods were developed and applied during the project: Group discussions, questionnaires and qualitative interviews with stakeholders were complemented by discussions among researchers and practical partners at European project meetings, via email and telephone and by a working conference with stakeholders in Budapest, in October 2002.
In each country, one SE agency was the focus of research carried out by a national research institute. The two years of the project were divided into five phases, each phase dedicated to one stakeholder group. The research instruments were designed in such a way as to allow the interviewed stakeholders to develop quality criteria, which were highly relevant to them in their specific situation. After each phase, the national results were collected in a comparative overview, highlighting similarities and differences in the different agencies.
After the data collection, all national reports were scanned by the national teams (researchers and practitioners). The aim was to identify the most important quality criteria based on the statements of the different stakeholders. These many criteria were then brought together, discussed, clustered and re-clustered in a workshop. The result of these efforts (including discussions at the final conference in Budapest) is a list of quality criteria being the basis for this manual and a related product, the poster "Perspectives of Quality in Supported Employment (SE)".