First stage development of a team as secure base questionnaire using a Delphi study

Teams help mitigate emotional demands in high-stake professions, like social work. Providing a secure base fosters trust, giving individuals confidence to work competently and provide effective care for service users. The Team as Secure Base model (TASB) proposes that team availability, reliability and sensitivity promote reassuring internal mental representations that the team can be supportive in adversity. Creating secure base teams is of interest to organisations as identifying and articulating team issues is challenging. It is unknown whether the TASB framework reflects perceptions of secure base function in wider work teams. Creating a TASB measure could help establish this evidence. The Delphi method was employed developing initial questions for a TASB questionnaire, measuring Availability, Sensitivity, Acceptance, Co-operation and Team Membership. Across three phases, social work experts provided qualitative and quantitative data of items evaluating content validity. The final questionnaire (n207 items) conceptually captured five TASB dimensions for supervisors and co-workers.