Using communities that care for community child maltreatment prevention.

Abstract

The prevention of mental, emotional, and behavioral (MEB) disorders among children and adolescents is a national priority. One mode of implementing community-wide MEB prevention efforts is through evidence-based community mobilization approaches such as Communities That Care (CTC). This article provides an overview of the CTC framework and discusses the adaptation process of CTC to prevent development of MEBs through preventing child abuse and neglect and bolstering child well-being in children aged 0 to 10. Adaptations include those to the intervention itself as well as those to the evaluation approach. Preliminary findings from the Keeping Families Together pilot study of this evolving approach suggest that the implementation was manageable for sites, and community board functioning and community adoption of a science-based approach to prevention in pilot sites looks promising. Implications and next steps are outlined. (PsycINFO Database Record

Assessing an Adapted Approach to Communities That Care for Child Maltreatment Prevention

“…The data collection procedures, participants, and measures for each evaluation instrument are discussed below in sections dedicated to each instrument. Additional information on the CTC evaluation instruments used in this study, as well as a description of the adaptation process for these instruments for this adapted CTC approach can be found in Salazar et al (2016), as well as the publications referenced in each section. This study was determined exempt from review by the University of Washington IRB.…”

“…In our previous paper (Salazar et al, 2016), we presented preliminary findings from the evaluation of the Keeping Families Together adapted approach approximately 1 year into implementation, which suggested that implementation was manageable for sites (as evidenced by sites reporting high implementation fidelity and low implementation challenge ratings), and that community board functioning and community adoption of a science-based approach to prevention were comparable to that of the 12 traditional CTC trial sites at a similar point in the implementation process. The current paper aims to provide an update on site progress 3.5 years into the implementation process.…”

“…The second involved updating the positional community leaders who participate in the Community Key Informant Survey (an instrument used to assess community transformation) to include child welfare and early learning representatives. A more thorough description of our adaptation process, additional adaptations that were made, and initial evaluation findings can be found in Salazar et al (2016).…”

“…C. Brown et al, 2014) is a survey of key positional and referred community leaders that assesses the degree of transformation of community prevention service systems (in this case, child maltreatment prevention) and incorporates other validated scales from measures used with key leaders to assess CTC implementation (Feinberg, Greenberg, Osgood, Anderson, & Babinski, 2002). For this adaptation, CKIs were collected from 11 positional leaders (e.g., child welfare director, Head Start leader, mayor, lead law enforcement) and six referred leaders (two each from child welfare, early learning, and prevention) in each community every other year (the full list of positional leader types recruited for this study can be found in Salazar et al (2016). This paper includes findings from two waves of CKI data: one collected from both sites in spring 2014 (approximately 1 year into CTC implementation) and the second collected approximately 2.5 to 3 years later, in winter/early spring of 2017 (approximately 3.5-4 years into implementation).…”

Understanding and changing community attitudes towards vulnerable families: A review of literature and practice

“…As noted previously, eight of the included articles described or evaluated an intervention designed to increase community support for vulnerable families. The most common of which were the Strong Communities initiative (Hashima et al, 2008;Haski-Leventhal et al, 2008;Kimbrough-Melton & Melton, 2015;McLeigh, Katz, Davidson-Arad, & Ben-Arieh, 2017;McLeigh et al, 2015) and Keeping Families Together, adapted from Communities that Care (Salazar et al, 2016;Salazar et al, 2019). One article provided an overview of five different programs, three of which target community social norms (rather than parenting practices) (Daro & Dodge, 2009).…”