ABSTRACT
Client assessments of social work practice and the organizational context in which it is located have become in recent years part of the accepted wisdom of how to improve the initiation and delivery of the personal social services. Although there is room for doubt as to the policy impact of such assessment1, woe betide the commentator, of whatever ideological hue, who fails to offer due deference to the value of consumer research. The arrival of these studies has been consolidated in the attempts of some writers to collate, synthesize and extract practice lessons from these studies (Rees and Wallace, 1982; Timms and Timms, 1977, pp. 68-75; Davies, 1981, Ch. 2).
