Challenges of Street-Level Child Welfare Reform and Technology Transfer: The Case of Team Decisionmaking

Abstract

Team Decisionmaking (TDM) involves a meeting of community representatives, family members, and social workers who review every decision to remove children from their parents or change of placement, including reunification or adoption. Even when the leadership of child welfare organizations mandates the use of TDM, implementing TDM is very challenging. To understand these challenges, a research team visited five diverse communities and conducted 74 focus groups and interviews involving 180 administrators, caseworkers, community partners, supervisors, and TDM facilitators. This article reviews the findings of this TDM study through previous research on street-level bureaucracy and technology transfer. The results suggest successful TDM implementation requires attention to the discretion of street-level caseworkers and the organizational constraints they face.

Agency Culture and Climate in Child Welfare: Do Perceptions Vary by Exposure to the Child Welfare System?

“…Variations in an agency’s culture and climate potentially affect organizational support, staff receptivity, and ultimately uptake and sustained use of new practices (Aarons & Sawitzky, 2006; Crampton, Crea, Abramson-Madden, & Usher, 2008). In child welfare settings, in particular, climate and culture might have a pronounced impact on workers’ ability to adopt new practices.…”

Family Involvement in Child Welfare Decision-Making: Strategies and Research On Inclusive Practices

“…Qualitative data from interviews and focus groups show strong support from agency leadership that tends to wane closer to the front line of practice, given resource and time pressures (Crampton, Crea, Abramson-Madden, & Usher, 2008). In this study, and given the resource pressures, caseworkers expressed a preference for exercising more discretion in implementing TDM meetings.…”

“…The focus on distal child welfare outcomes may miss more subtle impacts on families (Berzin, Cohen, Thomas, & Dawson, 2008) and methodological problems may limit the ability to generalize from study results. Studies, by and large, suffered from methodological problems, including small sample sizes (Berzin, 2006;Crow & Marsh, 1998;Pennell & Burford, 2000), outcome evaluations with little or no measurement of program fidelity (Daro et al, 2005;Weigensberg et al, 2009), lack of a comparison group (Crampton & Jackson, 2007;Sieppert et al, 2000), and process evaluations with weak outcome measurement (Crea, Wildfire et al, 2009;Shore et al, 2002) or no outcome measurement (Crampton et al, 2008;Crea, Crampton et al, 2009). These significant limitations pose serious problems in determining the research effectiveness of family involvement approaches, but do point towards how future research could be strengthened.…”

Sustainability of a Child Mental Health Intervention in Child Welfare Services: Case study

“…39 Maintaining buy-in and momentum despite inevitable challenges is critical and adjustments to roles, structures, and workflow processes may be necessary to sustain the intervention. 40,41 Bond and colleagues 42 conducted a study to document the long-term sustainability efforts of 49 behavioral health programs implementing an EBI and found a varying degree of adaptation from the original model. Adaptations there were largely driven by changes in state level standards; however, in the current study, adaptations were driven by contextual factors in response to client requests and perceived needs (e.g., changes to timing of manual topics/activities based on families' desires, holding open space for topics families wanted to discuss, removing child eligibility criteria so more families could participate, adding YouTube modules to increase child engagement, allowing families to attend more than one FSF cohort if they needed more support) .…”