Don’t you want your child back?! Untangling the psychosocial influences on parental engagement in child welfare interventions

• In Event: 2-011 - Interactive Poster Session and Reception

Abstract

Meaningfully engaging parents in services is key to successful child welfare system (CWS) interventions (Platt, 2012), and despite the long-standing struggle to engage parents, the various influences on parents’ engagement remain poorly understood (Fusco, 2015). Prior work has focused largely on demographic and behavioral risk factors, with relatively little attention paid to mid-intervention psychosocial influences (see Kemp et al., 2009). Some researchers have taken a closer look at parents’ descriptions of their experiences, and have painted a rather bleak picture of what it is to be a parent in the CWS (see Dumbrill, 2006), but these qualitative studies are rarely linked to quantitative measures of engagement or outcomes for children. Further, most of this work has almost exclusively involved mothers and has done little to distinguish between types of interventions, such as those that do or do not involve removal of children from the home. The proposed research would contribute to this area of inquiry by (1) focusing specifically on psychosocial predictors of engagement that may be malleable during an intervention, (2) combining data on parents experiences, engagement in services, and actual case/child outcomes; (3) distinguishing between CWS interventions that do and do not involve parent-child separation (i.e., foster care); and (4) incorporating the experiences of fathers. Existing data sources typically do not include rich data on parents’ experiences, or do not link these data with data on case outcomes and/or child well-being. Better understanding engagement among CWS-supervised parents has important implications for intervention and policy development.

Author

• Brittany Paige Mihalec-Adkins, Purdue University
  Presenting Author