Visitation Matters: Assessing the Use of Evidence Based Practices in Child Welfare Visitation

Background: Parent/child visitation is a regular practice for children in the custody of state child welfare systems.  Visitation may serve several important functions including:  maintaining the parent/child attachment, reducing the child’s sense of abandonment, preserving the child’s sense of belonging to a family, assisting in assessing the parents’ ability to care for the child, and increasing the likelihood of reunification. However, little information is available regarding caseworker understanding of visitation.

Purpose: The study's purpose is: (1) to provide a qualitative synthesis of caseworker knowledge and training on evidence based practices in parent/child visitation and (2) explore the impact of a research based visitation curriculum on caseworker knowledge about parent/child visitation.

 Method: Researchers conducted 4 focus groups, 2 urban and 2 rural, with 10 caseworkers responsible for facilitating and assessing visitation in a large Southwestern state. Data were analyzed utilizing inductive analysis and creative synthesis (Quinn 2002).  This method emphasizes the importance of understanding focus groups separately before combining the data into themes to ensure that the themes are grounded in groups (Quinn 2002).    Inter-coder reliability was evaluated by having two separate coders for each focus group.   The second part of the project was the development of a research based curriculum on parent/child visitation.  The curriculum was piloted with 11 child welfare caseworkers who are regularly responsible for conducting and assessing visitation.  Caseworkers participated in a pre-test and post-test to assess the curriculum. 

 Results: The analysis resulted in the identification of four themes regarding caseworker knowledge on visitation.  These themes included: Outside factors, training, assessment, courts.   Visitation decisions are made by outside factors such as court mandates and workload issues rather than evidenced base practices.  Caseworkers reported little to no training in visitation and limited knowledge of best practices.  Caseworkers had no framework for assessing visitation and each worker had different assessment criteria. Finally, caseworkers viewed the role of visitation as a tool for gathering information needed for terminations hearings.   Overall, findings revealed that participants did not have knowledge of evidence based practices in parent/child visitation and were not using them to guide their work. 

Results of the pre/posttest assessment of providing an evidence based curriculum to caseworkers supported the need for training on visitation.  Prior to the curriculum training 66% of caseworkers reported being able to illustrate was to prepare parents, children, and foster parents for visitation, 77% reported they could recognize ways to use visitation to reinforce positive parenting behaviors, 66% were able to identify how visitation can promote placement stability, and 33% were familiar with an assessment tool they could use to assess parent/child visits.  Following the training these number increased to 91% across all 4 areas.

 Conclusions and Implications: This study suggests that caseworkers need additional training on the importance of visitation and how to make visitation successful for children and families.  The training developed from the focus groups is a useful tool for improving knowledge regarding visitation.

 References:

 Quinn, M. P. (2002). Qualitative research and evaluation methods, Sage.