Efficacy of socio-educational family interventions in child protection cases
A natural field experiment
At a glance
- Project leader : Prof. Dr. David Lätsch
- Project team : Hirmete Hasani, Julia Quehenberger
- Project status : ongoing
- Funding partner : SNSF (SNF-Projektförderung / Projekt Nr. 175986)
- Project partner : Fachverband Sozialpädagogische Familienbegleitung Schweiz
- Contact person : David Lätsch
Description
In Switzerland, recent years have witnessed an increasing
frequency of intensive family support—known under the German term
“sozialpädagogische Familienbegleitung”—with families who are seen
as unable to take adequate care of their children and to provide
them with the necessary conditions for positive emotional,
cognitive, and social development. In the child protection system
in particular, family support services are ever more frequently
mandated by child protection authorities with the intention of
preventing the more drastic measure of out-of-home placement. The
services are delivered in the shape of intensive home-visitation,
typically extending over a period of several months, where social
workers visit the families in their homes on a weekly or
near-weakly basis and work primarily with parents to encourage more
positive attitudes towards parenting and more appropriate parenting
styles.
The main objective of our ongoing study, which is one of the first
quasi-experimental field trials with regard to intensive family
support services in a German-speaking country, is to rigorously
assess the efficacy of these services, using structural equation
modeling to investigate causal pathways connecting baseline
characteristics of cases and attributes of the intervention to the
intervention’s outcomes. More particularly, in the framework of a
conditional process model, the research investigates the
socio-economic, social and personal characteristics and resources
of the families and its members, the observed risks and problems
that supposedly necessitate the intervention, and the development
of these phenomena over the course of the intervention and a
subsequent follow-up period. Data collection tools encompass
interviews and questionnaires addressed to social workers carrying
out the intervention, and parents and their children receiving the
services. The study involves an intervention and an
comparison group. In addition, the research incorporates a
mixed-methods sequential explanatory design, where the findings
from the quantitative analyses will be discussed with frontline
workers, child protection authority board members and parents and
children in both homogeneous and mixed focus groups.
Further information
Publications
-
2019.
In:
Jahrestagung der Kommission Sozialpädagogik, Lüneburg, 23.-25. Mai 2019.