Increasing Participation and Improving Engagement in Home Visitation

Abstract

Home visitation programs are designed to provide comprehensive services that promote parent's abilities to create stable, nurturing care environments for their children. In order for program goals to be met, parents must participate actively and be engaged with the programs' mission. However, promoting engagement and participation are complex processes that have been understudied in research on home visitation. The current qualitative study examined how a national, federally funded home visitation program, Early Head Start (EHS), engaged and retained families so that potentially helpful preventative interventions could be delivered. The study also identified barriers to active engagement. Semistructured interviews were conducted with 10 parents of children enrolled in EHS. Findings suggest that engagement increased when EHS reduced social isolation by forming connections among parents and when the program focused on involving parents in fostering their children's meeting of important developmental milestones. Barriers to engagement identified included logistical and organizational challenges, as well as parental biases and differences in values and attitudes. Practice and policy recommendations for improving EHS and other programs that serve similar populations to increase engagement are discussed.

Strategies for implementation of virtual home visitation in the United States

“…Finally, all respondents were from a social work training programme, and therefore their experience may not be widely attributable to other home visitation providers. However, the responses of the social work interns were in keeping with research on on-ground home visitation (Hubel et al, 2017).…”

“…Home visitation studies have also shown that involving parents in fostering their children's meeting of important developmental milestones is a key factor in sustained engagement (Hubel et al, 2017).…”

“…Prior telepractice studies have shown that a sense of autonomy, competence, relatedness, goal attainment, and goal setting underpin motivation to use telepractice systems (Ingersoll & Berger, 2015). Home visitation studies have also shown that involving parents in fostering their children's meeting of important developmental milestones is a key factor in sustained engagement (Hubel et al., 2017). In keeping with both sectors, providers of telepractice‐based home visitation remarked on the importance of partnering with families to set goals and to have tangible methods for tracking outcomes.…”

Evaluation of the Feasibility and Perceived Value of Integrating Learn the Signs. Act Early. Developmental Monitoring Resources in Early Head Start

“…This is important because parents are able to better notice and express concerns if they have knowledge and information about typical child development behaviors (Marshall et al, 2016). Moreover, having more meaningful conversations about development is a key aspect of quality family engagement, which is a goal of EHS programs (Hubel et al, 2017). Although the number of parents who reported on the outcomes of conversations with professionals about development concerns was small, it is encouraging to see that conversations took place that led to their children receiving services.…”

Early Head Start service use by families with court-substantiated maltreatment

“…Engagement has also been shown to increase when goals are aligned between home visitor and caregiver (Burrell et al, 2018), indicating that connection to community-based services should be specifically linked to a caregiver identified goal. Previous research examining engagement in EHS has also suggested that programs should focus on reducing isolation through increasing social support and improving caregiver self-sufficiency (Hubel, Schreier, Wilcox, Flood, & Hansen, 2017). It is possible that increasing social support and caregiver self-sufficiency could have preventive effects related to maltreatment occurrence.…”