Needs are Not Gaps
Scriven (1991) vs. Altschuld & Watkins (2014)
Last week, I assisted a couple of colleagues working on the data analysis for a needs assessment for a California county. As I spoke with them about how to organize the findings, the conversation turned to the structure of a needs assessments. Before I knew it, I found myself arguing that all needs assessments are basically the same – the only thing that distinguishes them are details of the specific case. The structure goes like this:
Needs – Available Resources = Gaps
That is, if we need 20 therapists and we have 15, we have a gap of 5 therapists. The most complicated part of the equation is of course, the Needs. This term contains another structural relationship:
Needs = Resources Required for A Satisfactory Mode of Existence or Level of Performance – Tolerance for Shortfalls
Now things get interesting. By “Satisfactory Mode of Existence”, Michael Scriven’s phrase (Evaluation Thesaurus, 1991, p. 242), I mean only what most normal people mean: food, shelter, relationships, freedom of movement, and so forth. “Level of Performance” is defined in terms of the goals of a particular system, such as the educational requirement of being able to land a plane before being awarded a pilot’s license for small aircraft. While basic needs are absolute, levels of performance will vary considerably according to the goals of the system. Knowing the difference between them is crucial for the serious evaluator.
To Scriven’s definition of a need, I’ve added “Tolerance for Shortfalls” to capture the idea that we will usually be willing to accept a certain level of failure or risk in attaining satisfactory conditions. For example, it would be hard to design a society in which no one could go hungry temporarily, even accidentally by getting lost in the woods. Likewise, all our existing methods of attaining satisfactory conditions come with a risk of failure that may be acceptable. The village clinic can treat basic illnesses unless there is a once-in-a-century typhoon that wipes it out. The amount of resources we are willing to invest in building backup systems for unlikely contingencies is a mercurial variable that changes much more readily than our basic standards for life. We need to treat it accordingly in our mental model.
Whose standards?
To some stubborn souls, the idea of publicly accepted and definable (I did not say “universal”) needs sounds implausible. Standards vary, but I have never met anyone who could not say with great certainty what the basic needs of a person in their community would be. As long as we refrain from doing a needs assessment of planet Earth, we should be alright. Scriven was a realist about needs, by which I mean that he thought needs are facts rather than opinions:
“The crucial perspective to retain on [needs assessment] is that it is a process for discovering facts about the functions or dysfunctions of organisms or systems; it’s not an opinion survey or a wishing trip. It is a fact about children, in our environment, that they need vitamin C and basic literacy skills, whether or not they think so or their parents think so…” (Evaluation Thesaurus, p. 243).
Notice that he specifies “in our environment.” Discovering the facts about needs is not a trivial task. It can take a long time and many conversations. We will probably start with a list of needs and then have to expand it. Needs assessments from organizations are easier than needs assessments of whole communities. However, just because a task is difficult doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it. In fact, I would argue that good needs assessments are critical for any system that doesn’t want to lurch from disaster to disaster.
The discrepancy definition
The main competitor to Scriven’s view was a live option when he wrote the Thesaurus, as it is today:
The most widely used definition of need—the discrepancy definition (Kaufman, Educational System Planning [Prentice-Hall, 1972])—does not confuse needs with wants (although some users of this model make that mistake) but does confuse them with ideals. It defines need as the gap between the actual and the ideal (or whatever it takes to bridge that gap). This definition has even been written into law in some states. But the gap between your actual income and your ideal income is quite different (and much larger) than the gap between your actual income and what you really need.
Given the obvious problem with this definition of needs, I was surprised to find a restatement of the view in a well-cited “primer” on evaluation published in a peer-reviewed journal more than 20 years later:
A need in the simplest sense is a measurable gap between two conditions — what currently is and what should be… This requires ascertaining what the circumstances are at a point in time, what is to be desired in the future, and a comparison of the two.1
The article, by Altschuld & Watkins (2014), cites and discusses Scriven without venturing what he might think of their definition of needs. In addition to the confusion between needs and ideals, this version of the discrepancy definition also confuses needs and gaps. If we do not distinguish needs from gaps, we will be in the odd situation of calling something a “need” only when we don’t have it - like saying that we only need food when we are currently hungry.
Things or gaps?
The appeal of the discrepancy definition, I believe, comes from our experience of learning about needs for the first time. We may not realize that a business is short-staffed until someone calls out sick and there is no one to replace them. Needs are experienced as a lack, rather than during ongoing state of affairs that preceded the lack. During a needs assessment, we may only hear about gaps because these are what our participants are currently noticing most. We use data about each gap to make an inference about the need implied by it, and there is nothing wrong with this.
However, as intuitive as it is, the discrepancy definition is one of the ways that the thinking of an outside consultant differs most profoundly from the way that planners look at their organizations. While the outsider writes up a long list of things that the organization or community could be doing better, the planner is busy allocating scarce resources to address problems that the outsider doesn’t even know exist because they have largely been solved. The outside consultant does not know how expensive it is to pay the rent and retain qualified staff unless he asks for this information – the planner never forgets it. The planner knows that “unmet needs” are a subset of all the needs and that there is never enough capital to completely eliminate that subset. In the naïveté of the outsider, it seems possible to reallocate funding smoothly from one use to another. The planner lives in world of fixed costs, step costs, compliance costs, categorical funding, restricted donations, and other board-game-like contrivances that prevent resources from moving around.
The result of this clash in perspectives is predictable: the outside advisor draws up a list of gaps gleaned from interviews with stakeholders and recommends that the planner reallocate resources to fill them. The report does not include any information on the needs that are already being met, the current budget, or how reallocating scarce resources might affect the extent to which the organization is able to meet the other needs. The planner throws this wishlist in the trash.
Indeed, the planner is absolutely right to do so. Were she to reallocate scare resources to chase the gaps while ignoring needs, she might be praised for “doing something” but the gaps would simply move around. In systems thinking, this pattern could be considered a special case of the “fixes that fail” archetype.2 A future needs assessment will uncover the gap in an area that used to be covered. Only a holistic, system-level view of the actual needs of the organization or community can serve as the basis for a decision about resource allocation when there are tradeoffs to be made.
In Scriven’s definition, needs are things and arrangements of the world: Vitamin C, a warm place to sleep, the ability to read. In Kaufman, Altschuld, and Watkins’ definition, needs are gaps: the difference between what you have and what you want. Without going overboard, it’s hard not to see a general outlook on life in this distinction.
Do you have what you need? I hope so. And I hope that you don’t spend all your time chasing what you only think you need instead.
Altschuld, J. W., & Watkins, R. (2014). A primer on needs assessment: More than 40 years of research and practice. In J. W. Altschuld & R. Watkins (Eds.), Needs assessment: Trends and a view toward the future. New Directions for Evaluation, 144, 5–18.
Senge, P. M. (2006). The fifth discipline: The art and practice of the learning organization. Broadway Business.