Social Climate Survey
What did we do?
We developed a bespoke Social Climate Survey tailored to the values and dynamics of our cooperative care model. The survey was grounded in a social climate framework that recognises the unique interplay of:
🫂 Relationship-centred care
🧭 Sociocratic governance
🧑🤝🧑 Multi-stakeholder ownership
🤝 Co-production
Our goal was to reflect the lived experiences, values and aspirations of care recipients, care workers, families and volunteers, and ensure our service environment supports a genuinely inclusive and empowering climate.
What did we base it on?
We drew on a range of existing validated tools, adapting them to fit our cooperative structure and principles:
Short Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-being Scale (SWEMWBS) A concise 7-item scale for measuring positive mental well-being, from optimism to social connection.
Person-Centred Care Inventory (PERCCI) A tool developed in partnership with people using care services to evaluate how well the service understands, involves and builds relationships with them.
Team Climate Inventory (TCI) A scale for understanding how team environments support trust, participation, innovation and shared goals.
Group Environment Scale (GES) Measures the quality of relationships, opportunities for personal growth, and how systems maintain or adapt within group settings.
However, none of these fully captured our cooperative governance, shared ownership, or co-production focus - so we adapted and expanded them into something new.
How did we design it?
We took an iterative and participatory approach, testing early drafts with participants and co-producing later versions together.
We also tailored the survey for four groups:
Family members
Care workers
Circle/team members
Volunteers
Why did we use this tool?
Surveys have limits - they don’t build trust in the way interviews can. But they do allow us to:
✅ Include more people, beyond those selected for 1:1 interviews
✅ Invite wide reflection on relationships, service experience, and community life
✅ Create shared ownership of insight and learning
To avoid extractive use of people’s insights, we shared the results with everyone who completed the survey, and hosted collective workshops to explore the findings together.
This approach made the survey itself part of the process of building awareness and deepening relationships in our care model.
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