Implementation of Parent Child Interaction Therapy Within Foster Care: An Attempt to Translate an Evidence-Based Program Within a Local Child Welfare Agency.
This paper describes an innovative adaptation of an evidence-based intervention - Parent Child Interaction Therapy or PCIT - to foster parent training services. The authors faced multiple problems that commonly plague translational child welfare research as they developed, implemented and tested their model. The paper discusses how the authors addressed these problems when: 1) specifying the child welfare context in which the intervention model was implemented and tested, choosing an intervention model that responded to child welfare service needs, and tailoring the model for a child welfare context; 2) securing external funding and initiating sustainability plans for model uptake; and 3) forging a university-community partnership to overcome logistical and ethical obstacles. Concluding with a summary of promising preliminary study results, a description of future plans to replicate and spread the model, and a distillation of project lessons, the paper suggests that child welfare translational research with PCIT is very promising.
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Helen Bader School of Social Welfare.
James
J
Topitzes
University of Illinois-Chicago, Jane Addams College of Social Work.
Joshua P
JP
Mersky
University of West Virginia, Department of Psychology.
Cheryl B
CB
McNeil
child maltreatment; evidence-based practices; foster care