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Child Welfare Involved Caregiver Perceptions Of Family Support In Child Mental Health Treatment, Geetha Gopalan, Mary Acri, Marina Lalayants, Cole Hooley, Eddie Einbinder

Journal of Family Strengths

Families involved in the child welfare system have disproportionately high rates of child mental health difficulties coupled with co-occurring stressors which impede access to child mental health treatment and therapeutic benefits. Peer support providers, an emerging workforce within child-serving settings, show particular promise at facilitating access to services, particularly for individuals with stigmatizing conditions. However, the perceived benefits of utilizing peer support providers from the perspective of child welfare-involved families is unknown. The purpose of this qualitative study is to describe peer support provided services and their perceived benefits within the Multiple Family Group (MFG) service delivery model, a clinician- …

Religious Faith And Depression Among Child Welfare Involved Mothers With Young Children, Elissa E. Madden, Donna M. Aguiniga, Karen T. Zellmann

Journal of Family Strengths

Using secondary data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Survey of New Parents, this study explores the association between religion and depression in a nationwide sample of mothers with young children who were referred to Child Protective Services (N=344). The findings suggest that, when controlling for other contextual factors, mothers who viewed their religious faith as a guide for their daily lives were more than three times as likely to have experienced depression within the last year. Additionally, mothers who attended religious services a few times a month were significantly less likely to experience depression than mothers who reported …

Exploring Child Welfare Workers' Attitudes And Practice With Fathers, Tanya M. Coakley, Allyson Kelley, Robin Bartlett

Journal of Family Strengths

This cross-sectional study explored child welfare agency workers' attitudes and practice regarding working with fathers whose children are at-risk for abuse and neglect. Agency workers completed a questionnaire about their attitudes towards working with fathers, their knowledge of barriers to fathers' engagement, and their experiences with their own fathers. They also completed open-ended items about services and supports they felt would be most helpful to fathers. A content analysis of the data revealed critical themes for four areas that workers felt could be enhanced to effectively engage fathers: (a) use diligent efforts that ensure fathers are present to contribute, (b) …

Strengths Based Approaches To Practice And Family Drug Courts: Is There A Fit?, Margaret H. Lloyd, Jody P. Brook

Journal of Family Strengths

Substance abuse among child welfare service recipients has proven to be a challenging obstacle to child safety, permanence and well-being. The use of family drug courts as a specialized intervention for working with substance affected families has risen dramatically in the past decade, and emanates from the notion of therapeutic jurisprudence. At the same time family drug courts have grown, the use of strengths based approaches to practice has also proliferated among child welfare practitioners. This work examines the intersection of family drug courts and strengths based practices, and encourages to reader to consider that while the court system would …

Effects Of Peer Recovery Coaches On Substance Abuse Treatment Engagement Among Child Welfare-Involved Parents, Stephen James, Richard Rivera, Michael S. Shafer

Journal of Family Strengths

There is a limited, but growing body of research on the effectiveness of peer recovery coaches in promoting treatment engagement, retention, and completion among child welfare-involved parents with substance use disorders. A quasi-experimental design was employed using propensity score matching to examine treatment engagement and treatment completion among child welfare-involved substance abusing parents who were exposed to either peer recovery coach engagement services or professional, non-peer engagement services. Using propensity scoring, the comparison sample of parents that did not have peer recovery coaches was statistically matched on the presence of substance exposed newborns, parental use of methamphetamine, and other predictors …

Design Teams As An Organizational Intervention To Improve Job Satisfaction And Worker Turnover In Public Child Welfare, Nancy Claiborne, Charles Auerbach, Catherine Lawrence, Brenda Mcgowan, Hal Lawson, Mary Mccarthy, Jessica Strolin-Goltzman, James Caringi

Journal of Family Strengths

This study focuses on the field test of a design team intervention in two rural and one urban site experiencing high workforce turnover. Hypothesis 1: Job satisfaction is significantly improved among public child welfare workers participating in the Design Team intervention. Hypothesis 2: Job satisfaction is significantly related to lower turnover in public child welfare workers participating in the Design Team intervention. The Design Team is an externally facilitated intervention in which team members consist of caseworkers and supervisors representing all services provided by the agency. The facilitator uses a formal logic model and team building expertise to guide the …

Policy Update: Federal And State Legislation To Support Grandfamilies, Ana Beltran

GrandFamilies: The Contemporary Journal of Research, Practice and Policy

Building on the progress of the last 20 years, helpful federal and state legislation continues to be pursued on behalf of grandfamilies. This update summarizes policy efforts during the last year and looks ahead to what is on the horizon. At the federal level, legislative efforts are focused on grandfamilies who are involved with the child welfare system. States are responding to federal activity by enacting policies to place more children with relatives and better serve grandfamilies who come into contact with the system, including “family finding” laws and including fictive kin as “relatives.” State policymakers are also striving to …

Assessing The Fit Between Child Welfare Information Systems And Frontline Workers: Development Of A Task-Technology Fit Instrument, Kurt William Heisler

Health Services Research Dissertations

States and the federal government continue to invest heavily in child welfare information systems (CWIS) to improve caseworkers' performance, but the extent to which these systems meet caseworkers' needs is unclear. In the field of child welfare there are no reliable user-evaluation measures states can use to assess the degree to which a CWIS meets caseworkers' needs, and identify which specific features of the CWIS most need improvement. The study developed such a measure based on the task-technology fit (TTF) framework, which posits that users will evaluate the usefulness of a technology based on how well it meets their tasks …

Organizational Leaders’ And Staff Members’ Appraisals Of Their Work Environment Within A Children’S Social Service System, David A. Patterson Silver Wolf (Adelv Unegv Waya) Phd, Catherine N. Dulmus Phd, Eugene Maguin Phd, John Keesler, Byron James Powell

Brown School Faculty Publications

Several studies have demonstrated the effect of an organization’s culture and climate on the delivery of services to clients and the success of clinical outcomes. Workers’ perceptions are integral components of organizational social context, and in order to create a positive organizational culture and climate, managers and frontline staff need to have a shared understanding of the social context. The existing literature does not adequately address that discrepancies in perceptions of culture and climate between frontline staff and managers impact the implementation of policies and services. The purpose of this study is to compare the workgroup-level culture and climate of …

Experiences Of Young Adults In Extended Foster Care: An Explortive Study, Elaine Marie Contreras

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Currently, there are thousands of foster youth in the child welfare system. When they reach the age of 18, some of these youth emancipate from the system, while some of them participate in extended foster care. The extended foster care system was implemented to support and provide services to young adults passed the age of 18, to provide them a couple more years to obtain stability in their lives. In order to participate in extended foster care, they have to meet a few requirements, and sometimes this is the minimum level of commitment and effort they contribute. These requirements include: …

Designing A Measure: Measuring Social Workers' Attitudes Toward Lgbt Youth In Child Welfare, Christi E. Bell, Raul A. Salcedo

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This study reports the results of an exploratory factor analysis conducted to analyze the reliability of a pilot instrument created to evaluate social workers’ attitudes toward LGBT youth in the foster care system. The sample (n = 60) included social workers, supervisors, and staff from the County of San Bernardino Children and Family Services. Data were collected from February 2011 to March 2011. A two factor solution yielded the best results; Chronbach’s alpha for factor one yielded a strong result for internal consistency reliability (α = .777) and for factor two yielded a less strong result (α = .628). Strategies …

Job Satisfaction And Burnout Among Forensic Interviewers, Christina M. Chiarelli-Helminiak

Doctoral Dissertations

Job satisfaction and burnout among social workers is well-documented in the literature, yet there is a paucity of research in this area pertaining to forensic interviewers. Forensic interviewers, specially trained professionals who conduct structured interviews with children who have made allegations regarding abuse, may be particularly vulnerable to burnout as a result of their work. A cross-sectional electronic survey design was used to gather information from 148 forensic interviewers associated with Children's Advocacy Centers (CAC) located in the Northeast region of the United States. While the quantitative and qualitative findings of this research indicate forensic interviewers are satisfied with their …

Refining The Evidence-Based Practice Attitude Scale (Ebpas): An Alternative Confirmatory Factor Analysis, David A. Patterson Silver Wolf (Adelv Unegv Waya) Phd, Catherine N. Dulmus Phd, Eugene Maguin Phd, Nicole Fava

Brown School Faculty Publications

Barriers to adopting evidence-based practices into real-world mental health organizations have received considerable attention and study. One particular attempt is Aarons’s Evidence- Based Practice Attitude Scale (EBPAS), which measures a worker’s attitudes toward adopting new treatments, interventions, and practices. This study follows Aarons’s work by conducting a confirmatory factor analysis of the EBPAS administered in a large child and family human service agency in New York state (N = 1,273). Replicating Aarons et al.’s four-factor model of the EBPAS, the authors found that, within the model, the pattern of factor loadings that was apparent in previous investigations held for their …

Using Preventive Legal Advocacy To Keep Children From Entering Foster Care, Vivek Sankaran

Articles

Children may unnecessarily enter foster care because their parents are unable to resolve legal issues that affect their safety and well-being in their home.[...] Yet these kinds of legal needs for poor families are rarely met. On average, poor families experience at least one civil legal need per year, but only a small portion of those needs are satisfied. For about every six thousand people in poverty, there exists only one legal aid lawyer. So legal aid programs are forced to reject close to a million cases each year. This lack of legal services threatens the well-being of children[...] who …

Information And Communication Technology In Child Welfare: The Need For Culture-Centered Computing, Richard J. Smith, Tara Eaton

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

This article discusses the introduction of information and communication technology (ICT) in the California child welfare system. Drawing from anthropological literature, the authors emphasize the role of work practice and context associated with new ICT implementation. This case study uses a documentary- historical approach to analyze interviews with 386 workers who used the Child Welfare Services/Case Management System (CWS/CMS) between 1997 and 2005. Data show the implementation of CWS/CMS impacted the work practice of the welfare system. The authors recommend culture-centered computing for future developments and upgrades of ICT in child welfare.

Exploring The Experience Of Biological Children Of Foster Parents : Their Views On Family As Adults, Jessica J. Studer

Theses, Dissertations, and Projects

Despite the fact that family foster care is a large part of the current child welfare system, little is known about the experience of biological children of foster parents. This qualitative research study analyzed the stories of ten adults who grew up in foster homes as biological children of foster parents from a family systems perspective. Common themes and areas for future research were identified. Participants identified and described diverse experiences in which both positive aspects as well as individual and family struggles . Participants described exposure to foster siblings behaviors and knowledge about their lives. Due to this exposure, …

Self-Efficacy In Newly-Hired Child Welfare Workers, Donna Cherry, Bruce Dalton, Angela Dugan

ETSU Faculty Works

Child abuse and neglect in the United States resulted in 676,569 reports in 2011 (U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, 2012). Workers in this field struggle with low pay, high caseloads, inadequate training and supervision, and risk of violence, all of which contribute to worker burnout and poor worker retention rates. Worker self- efficacy is predictive of worker retention, job performance, and persistence in this difficult field. This paper reports the development of a new measure of self-efficacy from a sample of 395 child welfare workers. Factor analysis revealed two domains of self- efficacy, direct practice and indirect practice, …

Sibley County Children’S Collaborative – Supporting Child Welfare Through Collaboration, Jade Blekestad-Kral

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

The Sibley County Children’s Collaborative meets the definition as a collaborative “organizational and interorganizational structure(s) where resources, power, and authority are shared and where people are brought together to achieve common goals that could not be accomplished by a single individual or organization independently” (Daka-Mulwanda, Thornburg, Filbert, & Klein, 1995, p. 219). Its functioning depends on members working together, sharing their time, skills, resources and the common goal of providing community support for children and families in Sibley County. However, effective collaboration does not come easily. In fact much of the literature regarding collaboration suggests that while collaboration is the …

Mental Health Services Among Children Involved In Child Welfare: Identifying Parental Views And Barriers To Accessing Services, Katrina Ohmann-Thai

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

• In the child welfare field there is an growing need for mental health support for children. This need is due to exposure to or victimization of abuse and neglect. On average only 15-25% of children identified as needing services are actually participating in some type of mental health support. This may be due to the many barriers that exist when seeking mental health support.
• This research project surveyed parents in Independent School District (ISD) 196 regarding potential mental health services offered through the School-Linked Mental Health Services grant. Information was collected through a survey of parents from two schools within …

Case Closed: Addressing Unmet Legal Needs & Stabilizing Families, Vivek S. Sankaran, Martha L. Raimon

Other Publications

This is the first of two articles that examines the role that advocates for parents and families can play in furthering the well-being and safety of children. This article highlights how the work of multidisciplinary advocacy teams with legal expertise can help prevent children from entering foster care. The next article will discuss emerging parent representation models that expedite the safe reunification of children already in foster care.

Put Him In Grandma's House: Investigating Variation In Kinship Policy And Procedure Across Ohio's County-Based Child Welfare System, Andreja M. Siliunas

Senior Independent Study Theses

Since 1980, the U.S. child welfare system has exhibited an increasing reliance upon kinship caregivers as a resource for children who have been removed from the homes of their birthparents due to allegations of abuse or neglect. Literature suggests that agencies differ considerably in their treatment of kinship care providers; however, limited research has been conducted examining the causes and implications of this variation, especially in the case of Ohio’s county-based system. The current study thus aims to define the distinguishing characteristics of kinship policies and procedures of child welfare agencies across Ohio, and to consider the impact of various …

Using Strengths-Based Leadership To Improve The Child Welfare System, Kimberly M. Giardina

Journal of Family Strengths

The child welfare system has primarily focused on the safety of children even though the goals of the system are to improve safety, well-being, and permanency. Through an innovative use of strengths-based leadership and the restructuring of service delivery, the Neighborhoods for Kids program has demonstrated how to effectively achieve all three goals for children in the child welfare system. The unique infusion of strengths-based leadership into the child welfare system allowed staff to creatively meet the outcomes without any additional funding needed. The goal was to strengthen the leadership in East Region and increase staff engagement, which would in …

Expanding The Ecological Lens In Child Welfare Practice To Include Other Animals, Christina Risley-Curtiss

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

Sixty-nine million U.S. households have companion animals and most of these families consider these animals to be family members. Research shows that children have powerful emotional connections with animals that can be both beneficial and harmful. Considerable research findings report that violence against animals often co-occurs with, indicates, or predicts other forms of family violence, including child abuse. A companion animal may be an abused child's confidante, and separation from that animal through foster care may be a source of stress and grief for that child. Child welfare agencies are slowly acknowledging some animal-human relationships, especially in regard to animal …

When Does Confidentiality Become An Impediment Rather Than A Pathway To Meeting The Educational Needs Of Students In The Foster Care System?, Angelique Day

Social Work Faculty Publications

The benefits of public, child welfare and education collaborations are numerous. However, different privacy laws that dictate professional practice within each respective system may cause tensions to surface across service agencies in the interpretation and implementation of these policies. A new perspective on the interpretation of these confidentiality policies is offered to guide the child welfare and education workforce in cross-disciplinary decision-making that maximizes the educational well-being of children in care.

Needs Assessment For Animal-Assisted Interventions: Factors Influencing Implementation Of Dogs As Judiciary Aids In Criminal Justice Processes In Cps Cases, Maureen Macnamara

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The study presents findings from a needs assessment exploring the critical features or core elements that bear on professionals regarding the inclusion of dogs as judiciary aides in the investigation and prosecution of child maltreatment cases. Specifically, the objectives of the current needs assessment were examined through the following questions: (1) What are the perceived benefits of implementing programs with dogs as judiciary aids throughout criminal justice? (2) What specific roles do professionals identify for dogs within criminal justice, (3) What are potential barriers to the implementation of dogs as judiciary aids programs, and (4) How are the needs and …

Agenda And Reports, Juvenile Welfare Board, June 13, 2013, Juvenile Welfare Board Of Pinellas County

Juvenile Welfare Board Agendas, Minutes, and Historical Audits

Agenda for the June 13, 2013, meeting of the Juvenile Welfare Board. Attached as supplemental files are previous meeting minutes and documents to review before the meeting.

The Effect Of Prenatal And Postnatal Care On Childhood Obesity, Michael M. O. Seipel, Kevin Shafer

Faculty Publications

Childhood obesity continues to be a major public health problem in the United States. If this problem is unresolved, some children will be at risk for disorders such as type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, and cancer and will become a high economic and social burden for society. Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, Child and Young Adult sample (N = 6,643), this study examined the relationship between the effect of pre- and postnatal characteristics and obesity. The findings of this study show that the probability of childhood obesity can be lessened if pregnant women do not smoke and …

Implications Of Child Abduction For Human Rights And Child Welfare Systems: A Constructivist Inquiry Of The Lived Experience Of Guatemalan Mothers Publically Reporting Child Abduction For Intercountry Adoption, Carmen Monico

Theses and Dissertations

The Hague Convention on the Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption was agreed upon in 1993 at the Hague Conference on Private International Law to address growing allegations of abduction, sale, and trafficking of children around the world. The Hague Convention guides countries to attend to the “best interest of the child” in making decisions on intercountry adoptions, and to apply the “principle of subsidiarity,” which calls for the consideration of family and kinship placement and national adoption prior to the consideration of intercountry adoption. This dissertation research focused on the experience of Guatemalan mothers reporting …

Minutes, Finance Committee Meeting, Juvenile Welfare Board, January 23, 2013, Joan Chamo

Juvenile Welfare Board Agendas, Minutes, and Historical Audits

Minutes from the January 23, 2013, meeting of the Finance Committee of the Juvenile Welfare Board. Attached as supplemental files are an agenda and materials to review before the meeting.

A Description Of The Demographics And Characteristics Of Families That Receive Multiple Child Welfare Referrals, Devin Wayne Edwards

Theses Digitization Project

The purpose of this study is to identify the demographic variables that distinguish recidivistic families, those that have received three or more DCFS (Department of Child and Family Services) re-referrals over a one-year period, from other families. Child welfare service recidivism is a historically expensive and socially damaging issue that should be further researched.