ABSTRACT
Assessments of the success of therapeutic intervention are sometimes treated in academic writing as if they were solely of concern to the research worker and the policy-maker, whereas of course such assessments are pre-eminently the concern of the client and the practitioner – the client for obvious reasons, and the practitioner for the scarcely less obvious reason that he or she must monitor the response to previous interventions in order to formulate an appropriate intervention for current or future circumstances. Staff assessments of residents in therapeutic communities are both recurrent and problematic. They may be set out in considerable detail, as in the formal ‘resident reviews’ found in some communities, or they may be a fleeting judgment made in the midst of the hurly-burly of community life. At Beeches, as at Parkneuk, resident improvement was judged by behavioural indicators – task performance, autonomy of performance, and social relations.
