Social Workers' Attitudes Toward Parents of Children in Child Protective Services: Evaluation of a Family-Focused Casework Training Program

Abstract

Recent concerns regarding permanence for foster children have inspired child welfare agencies to re-focus more of their efforts on biological parents as permanent resources for children in care. The social work field has responded to this situation with family-focused training for frontline staff; one such curriculum is the Family Development Credential (FDC). Tools exist for evaluating FDC trainees' retention of material and ability to integrate FDC concepts into practice. However, the transformative nature of the program (i.e., the way in which FDC training is associated with participants' family-focused attitudes towards clients) has not previously been measured. FDC-trained and non-FDC-trained child protection workers (N = 251) in one state completed a vignette study that tapped their attitudes toward the parents of children involved in child protective services. No difference in family-focused attitudes emerged between the two groups. Implications for practice and suggestions for further research are presented.

Empirical Studies of Child Welfare Training Effectiveness: Methods and Outcomes

“…In two studies (Alpert and Britner 2005;Bibus 1993) no effects of the training were found; both were studies that utilized post-test only designs and secondary data analysis. Alpert and Britner (2005) reported on a training program that was designed to influence caseworkers to be more family-focused in their attitudes.…”

“…Most (n = 9) focused on a highly specific content area or population group such as work with involuntary clients (Bibus 1993;Bibus and Rooney 1995), Indian child welfare practice (Bending 1997), investigative interviewing (Freeman and Morris 1999), domestic violence (Saunders and Anderson 2000;Mills and Yoshihama 2002), interagency collaboration (Jones et al 2002), leading multidisciplinary teams (Zimmerman et al 2003), and family-focused practice (Alpert and Britner 2005). The others (n = 5) were more general, such as those focusing on entry-level casework practice (Cheung et al 1991;Leung and Cheung 1998); (Strand and Badger 2005); child abuse and neglect (Smith et al 2000); and various types of substantive content (e.g., Owens-Kane et al 2005).…”

“…Five studies focused on audiences of child welfare or child protective service workers (Alpert and Britner 2005;Smith et al 2000;Cheung et al 1991;Leung and Cheung 1998;Jones et al 2002). Two focused on supervisors (Strand and Badger 2005;Zimmerman et al 2003), and five focused on workers and supervisors (Bibus 1993;Bibus and Rooney 1995;Freeman and Morris 1999;Saunders and Anderson 2000;Bending 1997).…”

“…Zimmerman et al (2003) evaluated a training program aimed at teams; the trained group included three teams of 29 individuals total, the comparison group included two teams of 15 individuals. Additionally, two evaluations used a post-test only design, conducting a secondary analysis of previously collected data, to compare outcomes of a group that was previously trained with another group that had not been trained (Alpert and Britner 2005;Bibus 1993). …”

“…The largest sample size was achieved using a secondary analysis design. Alpert and Britner (2005) conducted a retrospective survey of 251 child protection workers, some of whom had been trained, to assess the differences between the training and non-trained group. Only a few other studies had sample sizes of more than one hundred.…”