Using Virtual Reality to Learn How to Identify Threats to Safety and Protective Factors in Child Welfare: Feasibility, Usability, and Acceptability Results

Background and Purpose:Home visitation for social workers in child welfare is a stressful, high stakes situation for both the worker and family. Traditional training approaches for learning home visitation skills, such as lectures, PowerPoints, roleplays, and practicum, have limited empirical support as effective methods for learning the complex skill set required to conduct a home visit with a high degree of expertise. Currently, learning most often occurs on-the-job putting the family and social worker at risk. Virtual Reality has been used in professional training to create effective methods for learning complex skills prior to on-the-job performance. This study sought to answer the research questions: 1) Is it feasible to develop a Virtual Reality learning modality to teach home visiting skills? 2) Do trainees find a Virtual Reality learning modality usable?  

Methods:Question one was assessed using a feasibility study approach consisting of focus groups with a convenience sample of BSW students followed by a rapid prototyping phase. A design box, an inductive design tool for specifying the technological and user experience needs prior to development, was used to structure focus group data. The rapid prototyping phase involved iterative development and testing cycle with frequent feedback from learning and content experts. For Question Two, the final prototype, called Virtual Home Simulation, was tested on a second sample of BSW students to assess metrics of usability, including acceptability. Data was collected by observing individual practice sessions and a post-practice survey.    

Results:Major findings from the feasibility focus groups (N = 21) indicated that the technology and user interface needed to be “very user friendly” as many participants identified as “not tech savvy.” A realistic user interface was desired over an animated approach, a finding in agreement with the literature on skills transfer. Given the importance of realism and user-friendliness, much of the prototype development cycle focused on solving these two issues. Usability and acceptability testing (N = 8) provided evidence that these issues were solved with almost all participants agreeing the tool was easy to understand, use, and realistic. Several challenges were identified. The most important is the difficulty of creating conceptually distinct items for trainees to identify (for either threats to safety or protective factors) when the classification of an item is dependent on the absence or presence of other items and/or gains meaning only in the context in which the item is situated.

Conclusions and Implications: This study shows it is possible to create a Virtual Reality based training method to assist Social Workers to learn to perform in the complex and volatile situations often encountered when visiting a home for child welfare reasons. Future study of the effectiveness of Virtual Reality, particularly in comparison with current learning methods may show if investments in this cutting-edge technology will lead to training which reliably produces highly-skilled social workers.