Introduction

This chapter will unpack the logic of recovery capital as a metric of change for use in both applied and research settings and will consider what the strengths and limitations of such an approach might be. Distinct from Chapter 4, which focuses on the more technical aspects of measurement (Bunaciu and colleagues), this chapter will draw on Hennessy (2017) and Best and Hennessy (2022), to consider some of the broader epistemological and empirical challenges around the development and use of recovery capital metrics for different settings and what lessons have been learned in this area to date. As an organizing framework, recovery capital has several key domains that fall into differing ecological levels (individual, interpersonal, community; Granfield and Cloud, 1999; Hennessy, 2017). Conceptually, these categories make intuitive sense. Yet, when we consider the broad scope of recovery capital – all the resources one can use for recovery – it would seem that measuring it to both understand one's current level of resources as well as to assess change across ecological domains and/or over time could get quite unwieldy. In addition to its utility as a broad theoretical organizing framework, there are many natural opportunities to use the assessment of recovery capital as both a research exercise and a practical one for identifying ways to support growth, assess change in recovery, predict outcomes, and address programme and system-level gaps in supporting recovery capital development (White and Cloud, 2008; Best and Hennessy, 2022).