A methodological study of need assessment: The spatial allocation of resources for day care in Ontario

Abstract

The focus of this paper is on some methodological questions concerning the determination of need for a social service. Specifically, I will apply four different technical procedures for analyzing the relative importance of a set of five indicators which relate to the need for daycare facilities in Ontario. The procedures include two pairwise comparison techniques, a simple ranking method, and Metfessel point allocation. A critique of the utility of each will be offered and recommendations made to help in the collection and analysis of data to assist in the formulation of public policy on matters relating to the analysis of indicators of need with a view to using them for the allocation of resources. One of the principles enunciated in a recent report on day care by the Ontario Ministry of Social and Community Services (1987) is the explicit statement that: “services must respond to individual, cultural, and regional needs.” It is hoped that this study will contribute to the realization of this principle. Consider a region that is divided into subregions and for each of the latter data relating to several indicators of need for a social service are available. Attempts to develop formal procedures for handling these data with a view to determining a single measure of need for each subregion have been made by Stevens (1989) and Skelton (1990), among others. Much of their work has focussed on the search for weights for the indicators so that scores for each indicator for each subregion can be combined in a linear model to derive an overall index of need for each subregion. The allocation of resources, usually financial, among the subregions is then determined on the basis of the need index for each subregion. The adoption of this overall strategy for allocating resources is based on the view that the methodology is sound and any technical procedures that are used can be scrutinized publicly, and hence decisions regarding the use of public monies are made in a way that is clearly accountable and repeat-