Reflections On Citizen-State Child Welfare Partnerships: Listening to Citizen Review Panel Volunteers and Agency Liaisons

Purpose: This study identifies key issues affecting the effectiveness of citizen review panels to facilitate needed changes in child welfare systems nationwide. Through a CAPTA amendment in 1996, Congress created citizen review panels (CRPs), citizen volunteer boards charged with evaluating public child welfare services and suggesting improvements (Jones, 2004; Litzelfelner, Collins-Camargo, & Jones, 2003). Under this mandate, agencies were also required to provide information and technical assistance to the panels. Prior studies suggest that constructs such as group cohesion, information flow and perceived group self-governance strongly influence CRP members' perceptions of their panels' effectiveness in making a positive impact upon child welfare systems and service delivery (Bryan, Jones, Allen, & Collins-Camargo, 2007; Jones, 2004). However, findings also indicate that panel group dynamics and perceived effectiveness are only weakly related to CRP coordinators' ratings of panel effectiveness, who liaison between panels and state child welfare agencies (Bryan, Jones, & Lawson, 2010). What might explain the disparity in perceptions of panel effectiveness was the focus of this inquiry.

Method: CRP coordinators (N = 44) from 31 states and panel members (N = 408) from 33 states responded to open-ended online survey questions in 2008, providing answers to the following: What are your top three suggestions for how citizens can work more effectively with the child protective services system to ensure better outcomes for families and children?; and, What are the top three obstacles that prevent citizens and the child protective services system from working together? Using a constant comparative approach from the grounded theory tradition (LeCompte & Schensul, 1999), three researchers open-coded these narrative responses, and conducted secondary coding with identified themes to aggregate and clarify thematic categories (Creswell, 1998).

Results: The most prominent obstacles to citizen-state partnership included a broad lack of citizen knowledge about child welfare, lack of agency transparency, poor communication, lack of time, and lack of funding/other resources to support CRPs. Of these themes, coordinators and panel members were most in agreement about knowledge, transparency, time and resource obstacles. Other obstacles commonly identified by coordinators included perceptions of a token partnership between CRPs and agencies, uncooperative/disengaged agency leadership, and too many other worker demands. Recommendations to improve citizen-state partnerships included improving the quality of CRP efforts, educating CRPs across a range of child welfare topics, communicating consistently, increasing CRP community involvement, and changing a variety of agency practices. Other recommendations often made by coordinators included improved commitment to the CRP-state partnership, recruitment of diverse CRP membership, and legislative advocacy. Implications: Results of this study help place into context prior findings revealing a disparity in panel and state agency impressions of CRP effectiveness. They provide specific, new information about what issues to target to improve involvement of CRPs in child welfare, and how to foster better citizen-state relationships. These findings can facilitate a more informed discourse about the challenges and opportunities presented when attempting to democratically engage citizens in child welfare practice and policymaking. Results also offer guidance for interested researchers toward important next steps for further study.