Family Preservation Services Research Articles

Family Preservation Services and Special Populations: The Invisible Target

Children of color are especially vulnerable for a devastating outcome as a result of their living environment and are disproportionately represented within the child welfare system. Social workers, who are trained to mitigate the effects of social injustice and societal inconsistencies, particularly among minorities and oppressed populations, perpetuate the injustices associated with the child welfare system by ignoring the special needs of children of color when administering family preservation services. The authors present results from a national study that examined the attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors of family preservation workers regarding the service criterion based on whether a family is part of a special population. Results indicate a significant bias against targeting family preservation services to children of color.

The family at risk: issues and trends in family preservation services

The Family at Risk offers a comprehensive overview and assessment of the family preservation movement, a relatively new and highly controversial form of service delivery to families at of child removal. Mandated by federal legislation and hotly debated by politicians, practitioners, and public citizens, family preservation programs provide flexible, labor-intensive, home-based services that allow families to remain intact while addressing issues that threaten their safety and survival. Marianne Berry examines such programs, which have proliferated throughout the United States, and speculates on the future of this emotionally charged aspect of social work policy and practice. Berry measures the overall effectiveness of several family preservation models currently in use throughout the United States; defines many commonly misused terms, including imminent risk and reasonable efforts; and illustrates how principles of family preservation programs are often at odds with the philosophy and constraints of larger public child welfare and child protective services systems.

Creating Community through Psychoeducational Groups in Family Preservation Work

Intensive family preservation services are a specialized form of child welfare services based on the proposition that an intensive, multisystemic intervention can bolster the family's internal and external resources and prevent further child maltreatment and the need for placement of children into foster care. Research on child maltreatment has identified social isolation as a primary correlate of child abuse and neglect but has also found that informal social support from family and friends can be detrimental to family integrity. Formal pychoeducational support groups are presented and described as an alternative method to create supportive networks for families seeking to remain safe and remain together.

Family-Centered Services: Approaches and Effectiveness

Much of the emphasis in the nation's system of child protection focuses on investigations to determine whether child abuse or neglect has occurred, and procedures for arranging out-of-home care for children who are not safe at home. Less attention often goes to the capacity of public and private agencies to provide services that help stressed families prevent child maltreatment before it begins, or that enable families with serious child-rearing problems to stabilize the home and provide more appropriate care for their children. This article examines the current understanding of the most promising and effective means of serving families. It highlights the family-centered service approach, which encompasses family support services for families coping with normal parenting stresses, and family preservation services designed to help families facing serious problems and possible out-of-home placement. The article explains the characteristics of family support and family preservation services, and discusses how these services are accessed and financed. It reviews available evaluation findings regarding the effectiveness of the two types of family-centered services, and considers the challenges faced when evaluating such services. Finally, the article discusses issues related to planning and service delivery, such as coordination and system reform, financing, targeting, relationships between workers and families, and efforts to strengthen entire communities.

Intensive Family Preservation Services: A Short History but a Long Past

Intensive Family Preservation Services: A Short History but a Long Past

Using African-Centered Principles in Family-Preservation Services

The author discusses African-centered family preservation services and the use of a strengths perspective in work with African American families, focusing on the heterogeneous structure of African American families and critical issues facing African American communities. African traditions and ways of integrating these traditions into family-preservation work with African American families are described. Integrating African traditions reflects a holistic approach to family-preservation services, improves the breadth and cultural relevance of services, protects children, and empowers families within the natural context of their communities. These outcomes complement the goals of family-preservation services and enhance the chances of families remaining intact.

Effectiveness of family preservation services

Effectiveness of family preservation services

The voices of parents: A qualitative study of a family preservation program

Most studies of family preservation services have used quantitative methods to examine program success. This paper reports on interviews with primary caretakers of children who have been abused and those with behavior problems between six months and three and one half years after family preservation services ended. Primary caretakers were asked three questions: What did you find to be the most helpful in your counseling? What did you find that did not help or that you disliked about counseling? After family preservation services, what happened with respect to the problems for which you were initially referred? Families found the support and nontraditional approaches to counseling helpful. Parents with children who had been abused particularly appreciated the teaching component of services. Brevity of the services and switching workers midstream caused the most concern for families. Finally, how families fared after intervention fell into a continuum from improved to deteriorated. The implications of these findings for clinical practice and program development are discussed.

Predicting Use of Child Welfare Services after Intensive Family Preservation Services

This study explored whether selected client and service characteristics could help predict families' use of other child welfare services after receiving intensive family presentation services (IFPS). Of 192 families, over three quarters did not use out-of-home child placement services for up to 6 months after receiving IFPS. Additionally, well over half of the families ended all service agreements with child welfare in the same period Polytomous logistic regression was used to develop prediction models. The findings of this study have implications for the development and service delivery of IFPS programs. Specifically, the role of IFPS needs to be re conceptualized to more accurately reflect its place on the child welfare services continuum.

Residential treatment and its alternatives: A review of the literature

This review summarizes the literature for residential treatment, family preservation services, treatment foster care, and individualized services and evaluates characteristics of each model, methodological limitations of outcome studies, and treatment effectiveness with children. Although residential care is often viewed negatively, empirical evidence does not suggest differential levels of effectiveness compared to nonresidential alternatives. The results of some nonresidential outcome studies are promising, but efficacy claims should be viewed critically due to the absence of methodologically rigorous evaluations for both residential and nonresidential approaches. Future research should focus on establishing empirically grounded placement criteria, identifying what presenting problems are most amenable to each form of treatment, and maximizing the maintenance of treatment gains in the postdischarge environment.

Intensive Family Preservation Services

Family-based services have evolved over the past twenty years as a means of helping families in crisis avoid the removal of a child from the home. As a result of the Family Preservation Act of 1992, a number of preplacement prevention programs, designated as Intensive Family Preservation Services (IFPS) have been developed. The overall effectiveness of IFPS programs is now under scrutiny by various interested organizations. Few of the published studies were designed to employ rigorous, empirical research methods, and even fewer dircctly addressed families with adolescents. The purpose of the current paper is to identify problems associated with family preservation, to examine theoretical issues and assessment issues, summarize the available research, and explore implications that focus on prevention.

Family preservation—What is it?

Recent criticism confuses family preservation as a goal of the child welfare system, as a federal policy, and as a set of services or interventions. While funders emphasize the importance of reducing out-of-home placement over other policy goals such as child safety or improved child and family outcomes, others argue that the current focus on preventing unnecessary placement is too narrow. Increasingly sophisticated research to determine the effectiveness of family preservation services in reducing placement cannot speak to the appropriate goals of the child welfare system nor to the implementation or effectiveness of policy. Research that identifies “what works with what families”, however, has found that interventions associated with family preservation services are effective, that overall family functioning is improved, that children are protected at least as well as in other child welfare services, and that both families and workers are more satisfied with family preservation services.

Effects of the duration, intensity, and breadth of family preservation services: A new analysis of data from the illinois family first experiment

Effects of key components of family preservation services were examined using data from a rigorous evaluation of intensive family preservation services in Illinois. Simultaneous equations were developed using two-stage least squares estimates to model relationships between case characteristics, service characteristics, and case outcomes. Results indicate that the duration, intensity, and breadth of family preservation services have little overall impact on out-of-home placement of children, the recurrence of child maltreatment, or the closing of cases in the public child welfare agency. Policy makers, practitioners, and researchers are advised to look beyond these features of family preservation programs in search of effective interventions for children and families.

Service to parents who abuse substances: Literature to inform a practice-research initiative

Children of parents who abuse substances have become a concern of child protection agencies, family support services, family preservation services and increasingly of drug and alcohol treatment agencies. In the context of a formative evaluation of a specialised intensive family support service designed to address the needs of families at this interface, a literature review has been undertaken. From that review, themes relating to women as substance abusers, the children of substance abusers, and services to enhance parenting in these situations are reported. Implications for intensive home-based practice are identified.

Targeting Families to Receive Intensive Family Preservation Services: Assessing the Use of Imminent Risk of Placement as a Service Criterion

Targeting Families to Receive Intensive Family Preservation Services: Assessing the Use of Imminent Risk of Placement as a Service Criterion

Social science, child welfare, and family preservation: A failure of rationality in public policy

The social service community has accepted at least formally the dictates of science in evaluating its outcomes. Unfortunately even its most sophisticated research has routinely failed to conform with the rules of credible scientific research. As a result, the field's statements of its effectiveness are misleading and its policy advice is suspect. This paper develops these themes in reference to foster care and family preservation, focusing upon perhaps the best single evaluative study ever conducted in social work, the recent evaluation of family preservation services in Illinois.

Evaluating the Effectiveness of Family Preservation Services for the Families of Drug-Exposed Infants: A Pilot Study

Twenty-seven families of drug-exposed infants were followed during their participation in a community-based program designed to enhance child well-being and prevent out-of-home placement. The program consisted of multiple components including social work home visits, nursing services, early childhood education, support groups, and parent/child interaction groups. Results indicated that the program was partially successful. In particular, participation in the support groups and the parent/child interaction groups was associated with successful child placement outcome. The implications for social work practice are discussed in light of the parents' own perceptions of the program.

A Schema for Family-Centered Practice

The emergence of family-centered practice, including family-based and family-preservation services, is a promising development in human services (Laird, 1995), with the potential to revitalize child-welfare agencies (Cole, 1995). The vigorous, diverse development of family-centered helping approaches in social work, family therapy, and other disciplines is producing a rich, but at times perplexing, variety of therapeutic approaches (see Hartman & Laird, 1983; Laird. 1995; Nichols & Schwartz, 1995). Family-centered practice's diversity presents practitioners with a problem: How does a family- centered helper find his or her way amid a dazzling assortment of options.

Family Functioning as a Measure of Success in Intensive Family Preservation Services

ABSTRACT An experimental research design was employed in evaluating intensive family preservation services to reunify families after out-of-home placement. There was a significant difference between the treatment group and control group in terms of family reunification, but there were mixed findings with regard to the difference between the two groups on measures of family functioning. Although more treatment parents than control parents felt their families were functioning better, there was no difference between scores for the two groups of parents on normed instruments designed to measure family functioning. The author describes the measures of family functioning employed in the evaluation and discusses the confusing findings along with implications for program evaluation.

Evaluating Intensive Family Preservation Programs: A Methodological Review

To determine the adequacy of evaluations of family preservation services (FPS), which are designed to support families and prevent out-of-home placements of children at risk of abuse or neglect, and to assess the effectiveness of FPS at reducing out-of-home placements of children. References published from 1977 to 1993 were identified from a computerized search of databases for English-language publications using the key phrases "family preservation," "child abuse," and "family-based services." Unpublished references were identified by mail or phone from a listing of more than 200 programs in a national directory. Of 802 references initially identified, 46 program evaluations were reviewed. Ten studies met the following inclusion criteria: (1) evaluated an intensive family preservation program, (2) included outcome data in the report, and (3) used a comparison group. Five were randomized trials, and 5 were quasi-experimental studies (nonrandomized). Descriptive information about the programs and evaluations was collected. To determine methodological quality, two independent raters used a 15-item questionnaire to examine the assignment of families to treatment groups, the interventions provided, and the outcomes assessed. A composite score of 11 or greater represented an acceptable study, 6 to 10 represented an adequate study, and 5 or less represented an unacceptable study. Only two studies were rated acceptable, four were adequate, and four were unacceptable. Methodological shortcomings included poorly defined assessment of risk, inadequate descriptions of the interventions provided, and nonblinded determination of the outcomes. Rates of out-of-home placements were 21% to 59% among families who received FPS and 20% to 50% among comparison families. The relative risk of placement was significantly reduced by FPS in only two studies (one randomized trial and one quasi-experimental study). Despite current widespread use of FPS to prevent out-of-home placements of children, evaluations of FPS are methodologically difficult and show no benefit in reducing rates of out-of-home placements of children at risk of abuse or neglect in 8 of 10 studies. Consistent, methodologically rigorous evaluations are needed to determine the effectiveness of FPS and to guide social policy for high-risk children and their families.