Assessment in child welfare: Parent's perspective

Background: This research is a realistic evaluation of the child welfare assessment from the parent’s point of view. The focus is to study how assessment intervention, clients’ background and municipality factors are in... [ view full abstract ]

Background: This research is a realistic evaluation of the child welfare assessment from the parent’s point of view. The focus is to study how assessment intervention, clients’ background and municipality factors are in the connection to the outcomes. The research focuses on the five outcomes of the assessment: parent’s experience of the increased awareness of a) child’s situation, b) parent’s resources and c) needs to do changes in the family life, d) family situation has changed worse or better, e) consent view of the family situation with the social worker.
Methods: The data was collected by sending questionnaires to the parents whose situation had been assessed in child welfare. The data includes 177 responses (response rate 26,6 %). Analysing methods are factor analysis, correlations, hierarchical regression analysis and two-way analysis of variance.
Results: Parents’ experience of a good relationship with social worker and strength- based working were positively associated with the all outcomes. The other variables (father participated in the assessment, number of the meetings, parents received the summary of the assessment) were associated only with one or more outcomes. Good relationship with the parents and strength- based social work were important in the all cases but they were especially important in those situations where parents asked help from the child welfare social worker or family’s problems were associated to the parent’s situation. Furthermore, parent’s higher education was associated to the consent view of the family situation between the parent and the social worker.