The Unveiling of the Recovery Capital Growth Model (RCGM)

What has been achieved to date?

April 2025 will see the publication of the Handbook of Recovery Capital by Bristol University Press presenting the exciting and inspiring explosion of research, insight and innovation around recovery capital, its measurement and its application.

Available for pre-order on Amazon now!

This is the culmination of 25 years of, initially academic work, followed by operationalisation and implementation. This has resulted in two key achievements:

1.      A huge growth in the evidence base not only for recovery capital measurement but also as a way of mapping what works in recovery

2.      A transmission of engagement and knowledge to practitioners, peer services and to people in recovery, for whom recovery capital has become a core part of the understanding of their journey.

The development of first the Assessment of Recovery Capital (Groshkova, Best and White, 2013) and then the REC-CAP (Cano et al, 2017) led the way for a plethora of recovery capital measurement tools that my colleague Adela Bunaciu reviewed in 2022 adding to the growth and credibility of the area of recovery capital measurement (Bunaciu et al, 2022).

The REC-CAP alone has had more than 20,000 completions indicating its impact and its effective fit with recovery organisations. This work has led to ongoing partnerships with NARR (National Association of Recovery Residences) in five US states, led by the work done in Virginia but ably supported by the partnerships in West Virginia, Michigan, Maine and Washington State. These partnerships have not only allowed us to demonstrate the effectiveness of recovery residences but also to test innovations, using recovery capital measurement as a metric for evaluating effectiveness and impact.

So why change what is not broken?

As Best and Hennessy (2022) have argued, recovery science, and in particular the science around recovery capital is a young and new discipline – both in terms of our ability to measure and in terms of the emerging conceptual framework. This is particularly true of the measurement methods where Bunaciu and colleagues review not only showed that there were marked gaps in the psychometrics but the array of domains measured were bewilderingly broad. The authors were cautiously optimistic about the direction of travel but it was a direction and there is a long way to go!

From our own perspective, in working with the REC-CAP, there were three fundamental challenges:

1.      The REC-CAP consists of multiple scales. To start with each was given an equal weighting as a starting point. But there was no intention of maintaining that holding position once we had the data that allowed us to know which of the things we measured were more strongly predictive of positive outcomes

2.      Although we collected personalised goals and aims, we did not use these as part of our scoring system. In other words, changes in recovery capital scores were based on what a ‘typical person in recovery’ would value or want. But we all know that there is not a typical person and each individual is on a unique journey

3.      From the Communities of Practice we have run and the feedback we have had, there were too many questions that were intrusive and unnecessary and the whole scale was seen as too long, particularly for settings where there was not the same opportunity for in-depth work.

Introducing the Recovery Capital Growth Model (RCGM)

In the recovery space in particular, it is critical that we listen to our partners and to the people tasked with completing our recovery capital measures to meet their needs and to support their recovery objectives, whether they are the client of a service or a peer recovery specialist. So we have done that through our partnerships in recovery residences and more recently through our partnership with All Rise and the drug courts they work with.

This is evolution and not revolution. We have taken the core elements of the REC-CAP (which in itself was developed through our learning about the ARC and other recovery measures) and have done the following things:

1.      Significantly reduced the length of the overall tool by reducing some of the details around barriers and one entire scale that did not contribute to the overall scoring

2.      Simplified the open-ended questions so that we are able to make the process of ‘personalising’ scoring much more straight-forward. In other words, your score on the RCGM will not only be about what the science says you need for your journey, but will incorporate your own goals. This is a massive breakthrough for us in ensuring that your REC-CAP scores reflect where you are in achieving your own personal goals whether that is reunification of your family or learning to play the banjo.

3.      Core and modules: As part of the process of adapting the scale to individual contexts, we now have a model that is based on a ‘core’ set of scales with an optional set of additional modules (for issues like post-traumatic growth and employment) that means the RCGM can be adapted to the specific goals of your programme or agency.

4.      The scoring will be based on data and experience, not based on the arithmetical convenience for the researchers. This is part of an ongoing process of ensuring that the tool will capture recovery capital more accurately and will allow recovery services to target resources and supports more effectively to continue building the recovery journey.

Where are we now?

The Recovery Outcomes Institute team has committed nearly 10 years of work to building the science in this area and what we are doing now is a crucial next step in this process. Will this be the definitive measure of recovery capital? Absolutely not. We will continue to work with people in recovery, recovery organisations, treatment services and other academics to provide more and more accurate and helpful ways to support recovery journeys. But what we have now is a major advance and breakthrough that promises to take recovery capital measurement to the next level.

References

1.      Best, D. & Hennessy, E. (2022) The science of recovery capital: where do we go from here? Addiction,;117(4):1139-1145. doi: 10.1111/add.15732.

2.      Bunaciu, A., Bliuc, A-M., Best, D., Hennessy, E., Belanger, M. &  Benwell, C. (2023) Measuring recovery capital for people recovering from alcohol and drug addiction: a systematic review, Addiction Research & Theory, DOI: 10.1080/16066359.2023.2245323

3.      Cano, I., Best, Edwards, M. & Lehman, J. (2017) Recovery capital pathways: Mapping the

4.      Groshkova, T., Best, D. & White, W. (2012) The Assessment of Recovery Capital: Properties and psychometrics of a measure of addiction recovery strengths. Drug and Alcohol Review, 32(2):187-94.