A Multi- Faceted, Intensive Family Preservation Program Evaluation

This evaluation of a county intensive family preservation services (ifps) program makes several important methodological contributions to assessing post-treatment placement patterns of ifps clients. It is the first published ifps evaluation that utilizes an interval-level, overall measure of restrictiveness of placement, and one of the few that has followed placement patterns for a full two-years after treatment. The study is also a good example of complementing placement data with measures of family health and stability, and with qualitative feedback from former ifps clients. Finally, this study demonstrates the potential for doing methodologically sound evaluations of local ifps programs.

The Role of Consistency and Diversity in Building Knowledge in Family Preservation

Family preservation has been criticized for implementing programs that are not theoretically founded. One result of this circumstance is a lack of information regarding processes and outcomes of family preservation services. The knowledge base of family preservation is thus rather limited at present and will remain limited unless theory is consistently integrated within individual programs. A model for conceptualizing how theoretical consistency may be implemented within programs is presented and applied to family preservation. It is also necessary for programs to establish theoretical consistency before theoretical diversity, both within individual and across multiple programs, in order to advance the field in meaningful ways. A developmental cycle of knowledge generation is presented and applied to family preservation.

Editorial: The Demands of Protection, Preservation,and Permanency: Where Has Family Preservation Gone?

This Journal issue provides three important articles that will aid us in explaining what we do in service to families. We are very pleased to have the opportunity to print a major address delivered by William Meezan on "Translating Rhetoric to Reality: The Future of Family and Children's Services." The challenges of serving families under an evolution of models in Kansas is presented in "Family Preservation Services Under Managed Care: Current Practices and Future Directions" by Melanie Pheatt, Becky Douglas, Lori Wilson, Jody Brook, and Marianne Berry. What people doing the work think is addressed by the piece titled, "Perceptions of Family Preservation Practitioners: A Preliminary Study" by Judith Hilbert, Alvin L. Sallee, and James K. Ott. Finally, this issue presents a number of very interesting reviews of new resources.

Family Preservation Journal, Winter 1996, Volume 1. (Entire issue)

Entire issue (large pdf file) Articles include: Improving Family Functioning through Family Preservation Services: Results of the Los Angeles Experiment. Family Preservation Journal. William Meezan and Jacquelyn McCroskey Idiographic Self-Monitoring Instruments to Empower Client Participation and Evaluate Outcome in Intensive Family Preservation Services. Barbara Peo Early Evaluating Family Preservation in Nevada: A University-State Agency Collaboration. Christine Bitoni and Joy Salmon The Family Partners Credit Card: A Token Economy System Adapted for Intensive Family Preservation Services to Enable Families to Manage Difficult Behavior of Adolescents. Jude Nichols and Barbara Peo Early Toward the Development of Ethical Guidelines for Family Preservation. David A Dosser Jr., Richard J. Shaffer, Michaux M. Shaffer, DeVault Clevenger, and Dustin K. Jefferies

Family Preservation Journal, 1998, Volume 3, Issue 1. (Entire issue)

Entire issue (large pdf file) Articles include: The Role of Consistency and Diversity in Building Knowledge in Family Preservation. Debora J. Cavazos Dylla and Marianne Berry The Weekly Adjustment Indicators Checklist: An Application in the Child Welfare Field. Michael H. Epstein, Madhavi Jayanthi, Janet McKelvey, Deborah Holderness, Erin Frankenberry, Cassandra Lampkin, Molly McGrath, and Kari White Intensive Family Preservation Services: a Short History but a Long Past. Kellie B. Reed and Raymond S. Kirk Collaborative Conversations for Change: A Solution-Focused Approach to Family Centered Practice. Donald F. Fausel

Family Preservation Journal, 1999, Volume 4, Issue 2. (Entire issue)

Entire issue (large pdf file) Articles include: Behavior Problems of Maltreated Children Receiving In-Home Child Welfare Services. Ferol Mennen, William Meezan, Gino Aisenberg, and Jacquelyn McCroskey Measuring Consumer Satisfaction in Family Preservation Services: Identifying Instrument Domains. Stephen A. Kapp and Rebecca H Vela Intensive In-Home Family-Based Services: Reactions from Consumers and Providers Elaine Walton, and Alfred C. Dodini Coordination of Family Preservation Services in a Rural Community: A Case Study. Richard Freer and Kathleen Wells The Effectiveness of Court Mandated Intervention Versus Voluntary Services in Child Protective Services: Abbreviated Version. Loring Jones, Irene Becker, and Krista F alk

Family Preservation Journal, 2000, Volume 5, Issue 1. (Entire issue)

Entire issue (large pdf file) Articles include: Translating Rhetoric to Reality: The Future of Family and Children's Services. William Meezan Family Preservation Services under Managed Care: Current Practices and Future Directions. Melanie Pheatt, Becky Douglas, Lori Wilson, Jody Brook, and Marianne Berry Perceptions of Family Preservation Practitioners: A Preliminary Study Judith C. Hilbert, Alvin Sallee, and James K. Ott

Family Preservation Journal, 1999, Volume 4, Issue 1. (Entire issue)

Entire issue (large pdf file) Articles include: What Have We Learned from Articles Published in the Family Preservation Journal? Michael J. Holosko, and D. ann Holosko Family Reunion services: An Examination of a Process Used to Successfully Reunite Families. Lois Pierce and Vince Geremia A Multi-Dimensional Approach to Evaluating Family Preservation Programs. Cynthia A. Ford, and Felix A. Okojie Ordinary Families -- Extraordinary Care Giving. John P. Ronnau

Family Preservation Journal, 1997, Volume 2, Issue 2. (Entire issue)

Entire issue (large pdf file) Articles include: A Model for Family Preservation Case Assessment. Kam-fong Monit Cheung, Patrick Leung and Sharon Alpert Behavioral Outcomes of Home-Based Services for Children and Adolescents with Serious Emotional Disorders. Edwin Morris, Lourdes Suarez, John C. Reid A Multi-Faceted, Intensive Family Preservation Program Evaluation. Michael Raschick Targeting Families to Receive Intensive Family Preservation Services: Assessing the Use of Imminent Risk of Placement as a Service Criterion. Elaine Walton and Ramona W. Denby

An Examination of Treatment Fidelity in an Intensive Family Preservation Program

Most models of intensive family preservation services are based on providing flexible services to reduce risk and keep families together. This study examined 40 cases served by a public agency Family Preservation Unit in 1992-1993, in order to assess the provision of hard, soft and enabling services in the program and whether their provision matched the program model. The relationships of these services to program outcomes, in terms of child removal, new reports of abuse or neglect, and family gains in resources and strengths, are also assessed.

What is Family Preservation and Why Does it Matter?

This paper describes competing ideas about family preservation, defined both as a defined program of social services and a philosophical approach to helping troubled families. A straightforward definition has become almost impossible because the phrase has taken on so many different meanings, provoking controversy about its "real" meaning and value. Indeed, "family preservation" has become the proverbial elephant whose splendors and horrors are described with great certainty by those impressed by only one of its aspects. While skirmishes between "child savers" and "family preservers" have been part of the child welfare field since its beginning at the turn of the last century, recent debates over family preservation have been especially heated, generating more confusion and animosity than might be expected from the ranks of the small and usually mild-mannered social work profession. The debate is so heated that the director of one of the nation's largest child welfare agencies said recently that he is afraid to "even use the two words on the same page." <1> While the debate about the value of family preservation is unresolved, experimentation with different approaches to service delivery over the last two decades has helped to lay the groundwork for a resurgence of interest in family and community-centered reforms. Better understanding of the family preservation "debates" may be helpful if these reforms are to be successful over the long term. The paper discusses the competing ideas, values, and perceptions that have led observers to their different understandings of family preservation. It briefly chronicles the history of child welfare and examines key theories that have helped lay the groundwork for the resurgence of interest in family-centered services. It concludes with observations about how the competing values at stake in family preservation may affect the next generation of reforms.

Family Preservation Journal, 2001, Volume 5, Issue 2. (Entire issue)

Entire issue (large pdf file) Articles include: What is Family Preservation and Why Does it Matter? J McCroskey Family Preservation Research: Where We've Been, Where We Should Be Going. Jane Yoo and William Meezan Safety of lntensive In-Home Family Workers. Gwendolyn D. Perry-Burney Family Preservation Services to At-Risk Families: A Macro Case Study. Charles A. Sallee and Alvin L. Sallee

DISCHARGE PLANNING: A PROCESS MODEL

As the requirements for health care hospitalization have become more demanding, so has the discharge planning process become a more important part of the health services system. A thorough understanding of hospital discharge planning can, then, contribute to our understanding of the health services system. This study involved the development of a process model of discharge planning from hospitals. Model building involved the identification of factors used by discharge planners to develop aftercare plans, and the specification of the roles of these factors in the development of the discharge plan. The factors in the model were concatenated in 16 discrete decision sequences, each of which produced an aftercare plan.^ The sample for this study comprised 407 inpatients admitted to the M. D. Anderson Hospital and Tumor Institution at Houston, Texas, who were discharged to any site within Texas during a 15 day period. Allogeneic bone marrow donors were excluded from the sample. The factors considered in the development of discharge plans were recorded by discharge planners and were used to develop the model. Data analysis consisted of sorting the discharge plans using the plan development factors until for some combination and sequence of factors all patients were discharged to a single site. The arrangement of factors that led to that aftercare plan became a decision sequence in the model.^ The model constructs the same discharge plans as those developed by hospital staff for every patient in the study. Tests of the validity of the model should be extended to other patients at the MDAH, to other cancer hospitals, and to other inpatient services. Revisions of the model based on these tests should be of value in the management of discharge planning services and in the design and development of comprehensive community health services.^

Effectiveness of Community Case Management in Family Risk Reduction

This study evaluated a modified home-based model of family preservation services, the long-term community case management model, as operationalized by a private child welfare agency that serves as the last resort for hard-to-serve families with children at severe risk of out-of-home placement. The evaluation used a One-Group Pretest-Posttest design with a modified time-series design to determine if the intervention would produce a change over time in the composite score of each family's Child Well-Being Scales (CWBS). A comparison of the mean CWBS scores of the 208 families and subsets of these families at the pretest and various posttests showed a statistically significant decrease in the CWBS scores, indicating decreased risk factors. The longer the duration of services, the greater the statistically significant risk reduction. The results support the conclusion that the families who participate in empowerment-oriented community case management, with the option to extend service duration to resolve or ameliorate chronic family problems, have experienced effective strengthening in family functioning.

Looking Inside The Black Box

Intensive family preservation services (IFPS), designed to stabilize at-risk families and avert out-of-home care, have been the focus of many randomized, experimental studies. The emphasis on "gold-standard" evaluation of IFPS has resulted in fewer "black box" studies that describe actual IFPS service patterns and the fidelity with which they adhere to IFPS program theory. Intervention research is important to the advancement of programs designed to protect the safety of children, improve family functioning, as well as prevent out-of-home placement. Employing a retrospective “clinical data-mining” (CDM) methodology, this exploratory study of Families First, an IFPS program, makes use of available information extracted from client records to describe interventions and service patterns provided over a two year period. This study uncovers actual IFPS service patterns, demonstrates IFPS program fidelity, as well as reveals the usefulness of CDM as a social work research methodology. These findings are particularly valuable for program planning and treatment, policy development and evidence-based practice research.