Family involvement meetings: Engagement, facilitation, and child and family goals

Yanfeng Xu, Haksoon Ahn and Charlotte Lyn Bright

Children and Youth Services Review, 2017, vol. 79, issue C, 37-43

Abstract: Family Group Decision Making (FGDM) is a strategy to engage family members and social service professionals in child welfare to make decisions for the child and family (Olson, 2009). Family Involvement Meeting (FIM) is a mid-Atlantic state implementation of FGDM in the United States. The current study sample is comprised of 460 participants who attended FIMs at local Departments of Social Services (DSS). The objectives of this study are to examine relations among participants' engagement, facilitators' practices, and child and family service planning outcomes during the FIM. Results of ANOVA tests show that family members, DSS workers and supervisors, and other professionals have significant differences in engagement levels and evaluations of facilitators' practice; and facilitators' practice also varied significantly based on reasons for FIM meeting. Logistic regression results indicate that participants' engagement and facilitators' practice are significant predictors of service planning on achievement of family's goals and protection of child's safety. Results imply that facilitators should improve facilitation performance and make more efforts in engaging family members to improve FIM outcomes and child well-being.

Keywords: Family group decision making; Family involvement meeting; Child welfare (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0190740917300798
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:cysrev:v:79:y:2017:i:c:p:37-43

DOI: 10.1016/j.childyouth.2017.05.026

Access Statistics for this article

Children and Youth Services Review is currently edited by Duncan Lindsey

More articles in Children and Youth Services Review from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().