Measuring Individualized Parent Advocate Services in Children’s Mental Health: A Contextualized Theoretical Application

Abstract

Scant research literature exists documenting the details of services rendered by peer support providers and their relative impact on children and families. The specific services delivered by peer providers, how the provision of such services are determined and tailored to the needs of individual families, and the tools used to gather services information are largely unknown. We examined how ''parent advocates'' in the state of Ohio conducted their work with families served through publicly funded children's mental health services. In partnership with the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) Ohio, we qualitatively explored the services provided by parent advocates to families with children experiencing emotional and behavioral health challenges. We conducted semistructured focus groups and individual interviews with 11 adult parent advocates operating in two metropolitan counties of Ohio. The findings include an account of the specific service activities in which the advocates engage with families, a description of how advocates plan and provide individualized and culturally responsive care to families, and advocates' definitions of success. The study further resulted in the development of the Family Advocate Services Checklist (FASC), a tool to assist NAMI Ohio in gathering advocate services data. We discuss the findings with regard to grounding peer support provider approaches in theory (social support and empowerment), the juxtaposition of individualized and culturally responsive care for children and families through peer support providers, and how the FASC can be used to document advocate services and tie them to child and family outcomes in future studies.

What Family Support Specialists Do: Examining Service Delivery

“…Wisdom et al (2011) found that the walkthrough process was both feasible and acceptable to FSS as a way of evaluating services. Consistent with previous studies (Davis et al, 2011; Rodriguez et al, 2011), there was substantial variability in services provided by FSSs.…”

“…In Rodriguez et al (2011), FSSs described their job functions, demonstrating that FSS provided a variety of services, including information/education, one-on-one advocacy, tangible assistance (e.g., childcare, transportation vouchers) parenting skills, and emotional support. Davis, Gavazzi, Scheer, & Uppal (2011) conducted qualitative interviews with parent advocates to understand specific activities when working with families in publicly funded mental health programs. They described their day-to-day activities as including service system advocacy and support, parent education and empowerment, emotional and social support, resource information and linkage, and material services and supports (e.g., transportation).…”

Networked Empowerment on Facebook Groups for Parents of Children with Special Needs

“…Participants described health and education special needs services as complex and confusing, a sentiment documented in prior literature (e.g., [45]). Echoing Davis et al [13], participants reported that they relied heavily on veteran parents on social media sites to learn about IEPs and to prepare for their IEP meeting.…”

Obtaining Stakeholder Consensus on the Core Components of a Parent Support and Training Model for Parents of Children with Serious Emotional Disturbances

“…from interviews with Pst providers we learned that one common action taken in practice to help caregivers feel hopeful is organization of groups of other caregivers to provide opportunity for group learning and social support. This activity is one example of an intervention that alone has the potential to meet all goals of the underlying theory of this intervention (ireys et al, 2002): it provides opportunities for caregivers to establish community ties that may lead to an increased sense of social support and empowerment; opportunities for community-building, networking, and advocacy; and an outlet for reciprocity and social comparison (davis, Gavazzi, scheer, & uppal, 2011). This component also had a highfrequency rating (4.46), indicating that it is frequently being carried out, thus showing evidence through this example that the goals of the underlying theory are generally being upheld in practice in Kansas.…”

“…findings from this study provide a template for program development that is theory based and family driven. use of concept mapping allowed us to identify components of a model that had support in the literature as well as with stakeholders, thus contributing to the development of a sound model that will likely demonstrate efficacy in translation to community settings (davis et al, 2011;Munson et al, 2009;rodriguez et al, 2011).…”