Since 1993 the Family Intervention Project has provided a multifaceted intervention for families with a history of child abuse, substance abuse and mental health problems utilizing in-home interventions and linkage to community services. This project, continually funded by OCAN, has been extensively evaluated. A flexible, multi-method evaluation, designed to capture individual, family and community level data, has been continually in place to document the ongoing processes, impacts and outcomes of the project. This has provided rich feedback about the effectiveness of FIP across many dimensions. Findings indicate the project has continually prevented the families' involvement with the child protection system. The project clearly reduces the risk of abuse and neglect while teaching families how to succeed. Because of the emphasis on both qualitative and quantitative methods, this evaluation has captured a broad understanding of the family's lives, what their life situations mean to them, how they perceive the project and the evaluation. In addition, the evaluation has captured data on project impacts on children's education. One important contribution is the documentation of issues faced by project staff, especially exiting staff, to support an understanding of the complexity of these initiatives and their tendency toward frequent staff turnover. As this project was conducted prior to and after implementation of welfare reform, another important unanticipated contribution has been capturing data on the impacts of changing policies in the community support/intervention systems on agency activities and family change efforts.
Learning Objectives: 1. At the conclusion of the session the participants will be able to describe two significant contributions of using a mixed method evaluation design for family violence prevention interventions. 2. At the conclusion of the session the participants will be able to identify two processes for using qualitative methods to expand data collection in evaluations. 3. At the conclusion of the session participants will be able to list two additional issues that should be considered when designing family violence prevention interventions.
Keywords: Evaluation, Interventions
Presenting author's disclosure statement:
Organization/institution whose products or services will be discussed: Valley Youth House, Allentwon PA - the funded agency conducting the project
Disclosure not received
Relationship: Not Received.