Society for Social Work and Research

Background and Purpose: Increasingly, cross-cultural evidence supports community-based programs as alternatives to institutional placement for the promotion of healthy development for children in child welfare and juvenile justice systems. Data supporting the promise of evidence-based approaches focusing on community-based models is growing (Kazdin, 2005). The positive effects of models based on local practices within communities have been documented and their translation to alternative contexts is underway (Al-Krenawi & Graham, 2000). The Jordanian National Action Plan for Children places a priority on the development of community-based programs for institutionalized children in child welfare and juvenile justice in The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. It is anticipated that these programs will increase child wellbeing, promote community safety, and re-enforce deeply held cultural convictions about community/family integrity. The current symposium represents the first phase of a long-term UNICEF-funded project involving researchers, government, and community-based organizations to develop and implement alternatives to institutions for Jordanian children.

Methods: The first phase of the Community-Family Integration Team (C-FIT) project involved an assessment of children in institutional care as well as systematic reviews of current best practices for institutional alternatives and effective cultural translation. Symposium papers utilize a breadth of methodological approaches to assess child functioning and guidance for best practices in adapting and implementing evidence-based programs. The first paper utilized a systematic review of the literature on adaptation of evidence-based practices to the Middle East. The second paper presents findings from the first meta-analysis of juvenile justice diversion in over 25 years and explores potential key cultural moderators that could be important to translation to a Jordanian context. The third paper presents results of a qualitative study of the functioning of care-leaving Jordanian youth who had aged out of institutional settings. The final paper explores the wellbeing of children in the Jordanian orphanage/care-home system in order to increase understanding of the needs of children who might be better served outside institutions.

Results: The findings from the C-FIT project underscore the need of children currently in institutional care for policies that stress community alternatives. Findings highlight the step-by-step partnership of the C-FIT program and the development of a culturally congruent framework of collaborative work and intervention between external and local expertise. In addition, a comprehensive battery of clinical assessment measures was completed on children in institutions to empirically describe their unique needs and strengths, which will facilitate subsequent intervention development.

Conclusions and Implications: Research on the design, development, and dissemination of empirically supported community-based interventions is leading to a consensus about systematic strategies for introducing new evidence-based programs into existing social service systems. All too often, evidence-based programs have been developed and shown to be effective in one context; yet subsequent large-scale implementation efforts have failed (Fraser et al., 1997). The results presented in this symposium illustrate the foundation of a university-government-community partnership in Jordan that is moving forward with interventions with the goal of keeping children in community settings, thereby increasing chances for a healthy trajectory for a vulnerable and oft ignored segment of Jordanian society.