Evaluating Family-Based Services

This book demonstrates the effectiveness of service reform efforts across a broad array of family-based services. It helps administrators, practitioners, and evaluators to balance clarity, precision, rigor, usefulness, and sensitivity to client needs and diversity in evaluating FBS programs.

Family-based service (FBS) programs have been developing rapidly across the country at a time of increasingly scarce human resources and in a politically volatile climate. Such a context has made evaluation of such programs imperative. The present volume reviews basic elements of evaluation in the light of current knowledge and then highlights the most useful research instruments for measuring changes in child and family functioning. Chapters focus on evaluation methods that can be employed to determine the success of existing policy and to influence the development of new policy. The authors assume that their readers will have a basic familiarity with research methods and program evaluation. They discuss the challenges they have encountered in conducting extensive research on family preservation, family support. and other related programs and pose practical solutions for administrators, practitioners, and evaluators confronted with similar difficult issues. Each chapter presents a brief conceptual framework for understanding issues related to assessment. Essential elements are reviewed, while research design, measurement variables, and qualitative and quantitative analyses are discussed in turn. The book concludes with a review of the limitations of evaluations.