Re-examination of the Family Law Detection of Overall Risk Screen (FL-DOORS): Establishing fitness for purpose.

Abstract

Conflicted parental separation is associated with escalating risks to wellbeing and safety for all family members. The Family Law DOORS (FL-DOORS, Detection Of Overall Risk Screen) is a three-part framework designed to assist frontline workers to identify, evaluate, and respond to these risks in separated families. The FL-DOORS system includes a 10-domain parent self-report screening measure, covering child and parent wellbeing, cultural and social risks, and safety risks experienced by and initiated by each parent. A first validation study of this screen was conducted with the first 660 separated parents to complete the measure at a frontline community agency, and found robust psychometric properties (McIntosh, Wells, & Lee, 2016). This paper presents a revalidation study of FL-DOORS screening measure with a new cohort of 5,429 separated parents, including 1,642 pairs. Our aim was to evaluate whether FL-DOORS was fit for the purpose of indicating a range of safety and wellbeing risks in separated families. We repeated internal scale reliability and concurrent and external criterion validity analyses. Original subscales were largely confirmed, and validity analyses were extended through a Multi-Trait Multi-Method (MTMM) approach. In this second larger cohort, the FL-DOORS screen was again found fit-for-purpose as an indicator of domestic violence and wellbeing risks in separated families. (PsycINFO Database Record

La importancia del contexto comunitario en la intervención con la familia: una revisión sistemática desde el trabajo social

“…No obstante, hay cinco estudios que no sugieren ni explicitan la fundamentación teórica de sus investigaciones: McLeigh et al (2015), Merrick et al (2018), Wells, Lee, Li, Tan y McIntosh (2018, Whitehead (2018) y Chen y Lee (2021).…”

Practicing Best Practice: A 10‐Year Retrospective on Universal Risk Screening in a Mediation and Counseling Organization

“…Family DOORS was designed for the post‐separation family law context and broadened to counseling services. Its ‘fitness for purpose’ was evaluated in analyses with two large cohorts of separating parents, which have mapped agreement levels between former couples, validated its safety scales against external risk criteria, validated wellbeing scales against gold standard child and adult mental health measures, and confirmed efficacy in detection of risk patterns (McIntosh, Lee, & Ralfs, 2016; McIntosh, Tan, Greenwood, Lee, & Holtzworth‐Munroe, 2021; Wells et al, 2018). These two studies about Family DOORS overcome the challenges in other studies which often rely on smaller, self‐selected samples, with gender imbalance, non‐paired data, and lack of external criterion validation (e.g.…”

“…These data practices have resulted in many important insights, such as: clients tend to be equally ‘honest’ in their risk responses whether we know their identities or not, based on anonymous client answers to DOOR 1 questions compared to answers provided by known clients; there is greater alignment of what ‘he says, she says’ between separating couples than is often assumed, according to analysis of over 1,000 matched pairs of DOOR 1 cases from separated parents (Wells et al, 2018); counter‐intuitively, parents seeking help for gambling say they are harsher in their parenting than parents seeking help for child or parenting issues (like post‐separation child counseling), suggesting that we must screen widely for family safety and wellbeing risks beyond just the presenting complaint (Heidenreich, Lee, & McIntosh, 2018); clients living with higher levels of identified IPV/FV are referred to, and use, more RASA services than those without IPV/FV, based on retrospective file review from hundreds of cases, (Lee, 2016); and we have confidence that RASA services contributed to greater safety: over 80% of parents reporting IPV/FV at intake reported greater safety after receiving RASA support, according to anonymous client survey data. …”

Supporting Children and Parents in Sweden through Collaboration Teams

“…To offer support to children and parents in the target group 4. To strengthen the child's participation The risk detection model FL-DOORS has been developed by a research team in Australia in cooperation with researchers in Canada and the United States (see McIntosh & Ralfs, 2012a, 2012bMcIntosh, Wells, & Lee, 2016;Wells, Lee, Li, Tan, & McIntosh, 2018). The aim of the FL-DOORS is to be a "doorway" to support and services.…”