Bringing fidelity monitoring to child welfare: lessons learned from the CORE Teen resource parent training

Abstract

ABSTRACT While a variety of disciplines regularly use fidelity monitoring in order to understand a program’s efficacy, few examples of fidelity monitoring exist within the field of child welfare. This study provides an example of a fidelity-monitoring measure used the Critical Ongoing Resource Family Education (CORE) Teen, a training program for prospective and current resource parents of teenagers. The fidelity-monitoring tool provided valuable insights into the strengths and weaknesses of the training program as well as possible explanations for changes (and lack thereof) in participants’ competency levels. While the lack of diverse trainers limits the generalizability of the findings, this tool provides a promising start to fidelity monitoring in the child welfare field.