Objective Over the past 20 years, an increasing portion of children and adolescents has received assistance from the Child Welfare Services (CWS) in Norway. Today, roughly every tenth child receives at least one intervention... [ view full abstract ]
Objective
Over the past 20 years, an increasing portion of children and adolescents has received assistance from the Child Welfare Services (CWS) in Norway. Today, roughly every tenth child receives at least one intervention in the course of childhood and adolescence. In-home services form the main type of interventions offered by the CWS. Despite of the considerable public investment, little research has focused on in-home services up to present day. One important part of the project “Research on Norwegian Child Welfare Services in-home” initiated by the Norwegian Directorate for Children, Youth and Family Affairs, was to gain in-depth knowledge about parent counseling, which is the most common in-home intervention. This paper will present the method and the main findings from this part of the project.
Method
Parents and case workers in 12 cases were interviewed. The data have been supplemented by two focus group interviews with supervisors performing this type of intervention. Each interview was audiotaped, transcribed and analyzed using the software NVIVO 10. Thematic analysis allowed for identifying and analyzing themes and patterns of meaning across our data.
Results
The 12 interviews with parents and case workers included a total of 16 children at the age of 0 to 18 years, 10 boys and 6 girls. Most children lived together with their single mothers or fathers, two of the mothers had a minority background, and only a few children lived together with both parents. The case contents could be described as a concern for the children's care situation, the mother’s depression, domestic violence, parenting problems, behavioral problems, return from foster homes, and fathers’ challenges in taking on their new roles in daily care.
There was great variety in terms of the scope and contents of parent counseling interventions. The frequency of meetings ranged from several times a week to monthly or even less often. Parent-child interaction was the most dominant topic of counseling. In most cases the intervention was performed by specific supervisors, while some case workers also performed this task. In about half of the cases specific methods were adopted (COS, PMTO). In the other half, general methods of social work were used. Parents who received counseling based on specific methods had more frequent contact with their supervisor compared to those who received general methods of social work. In about one half of the cases the counseling was carried out in the parents’ home, while the other half took place at CWS offices.
Overall, most parents stated that the counseling had led to positive changes, both for themselves and their child. In contrast, the interviewed caseworkers referred to less pronounced changes in this regard. Although the usefulness of the intervention was emphasized by both parents and caseworkers, we argue that the interviews with these participants as well as with the focus group with supervisors revealed several themes that need to be highlighted and discussed. This applies primarily to: The importance of a common understanding of the purpose of counseling, how broad the counseling can and should be, the balance between direct advice versus a more reflective type of counseling, the use of specific methodology versus a rather general social work methodology, the need for follow ups after the intervention’s termination, and finally the need for interagency cooperation.
Conclusion
Although parent counseling forms the most used in-home intervention offered by Norwegian Child Welfare Services, research on this type of intervention is limited. There still remains a great demand for descriptive research and approaches to examine the effects of different parent counseling interventions.
