HOME-BASED SERVICES PROGRAM - EFFECTIVENESS WITH AT RISK FAMILIES

Since the enactment of the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act o f 1980 (P.L. 96-272) family preservation is of major significance to t he child welfare field. As a result, family-centered, home-based servi ces have proliferated as a means of prevention of out-of-home placemen t and as a means of empowering families to help themselves. This is an exploratory, descriptive study on family-centered, home-based service s, involving a secondary analysis of an existing database. Client char acteristics are analyzed, and a subsample of high-risk clients is iden tified, based on a scale of risk of out-of-home placement developed fo r this research. Client characteristic is operationalized for this stu dy as all contextual variables present in database that are associated with the family, i.e., demographic, history of physical abuse, prior social services and so forth. Client characteristics are drawn from se veral client domains-psychological, social, environmental-and are not only personal characteristics of the client. The effectiveness of fami ly-centered, home-based services with the low- and high-risk client ar e examined in relation to four outcome variables. These variables are as follows, placement prevention, family functioning, completion of th e program, and improvement in problem areas. The study's findings sugg est that family-centered, home-based programs are effective in the pre vention of placement for both high- and low-risk clients. The study fo und a statistically significant difference between pre- and post-famil y functioning of families who participated in the home-based program. Among the implications of these findings was the assertion that home-b ased services are effective with the multi-problem family. The use of client characteristics as a measure of risk and potential program succ ess positions this study as a model for continuing research in this ar ea. The findings have significance for not only the child welfare fiel d but also for the profession of social work.