Examining the Process of Resilience for Foster Families

Foster families serve an essential function in the child welfare system as they take on the responsibility of providing for the needs of children who are unable to be cared for by their own parents. Fostering offers families the opportunity to contribute to their communities and to enrich their own lives.

Despite the important role foster families serve, fostering can also be challenging. Families have to manage behavioral challenges that often accompany a child’s history of maltreatment. Foster families must respond to difficult emotions stemming from the loss of being removed from one’s home. Foster families also face their own emotions as they welcome children to their homes and in a short period of time have to say goodbye to those for whom they have come to care deeply. On a practical level, foster parents must manage an increase in daily stressors that comes with meeting the transportation, educational, emotional, and health needs of the children. Fostering is a stressful endeavor and many foster parents terminate their license within the first three years. Yet, many families are able to weather these challenges in positive and meaningful ways. Understanding how families come to overcome these difficulties offers important implications for licensing agencies as they prepare newly licensed families to foster.

The purpose of this study was to apply the construct of family resilience to those families who have successfully fostered for an extended period of time to identify the strengths that help to overcome the difficulties associated with fostering. A mixed methods, sequential explanatory design was used to identify a purposive sample of 20 families who successfully fostered for over 5 years and who rated within the healthy range on the Family Assessment Device (FAD; Epstein, Baldwin, & Bishop, 1983), a standardized measure of family functioning. In phase one, a link to an online survey was sent to foster parents licensed in one southwestern state. Of the approximately 3,500 licensed foster parents, 772 responded to the survey (22% response rate). Seventy-one families met study criteria. Twenty families were chosen from these 71 to ensure diversity in the sample based on family structure, racial/ethnic identify, and location across the state.

Once the sample was identified, two in-depth qualitative interviews were conducted with each family to understand how these families have successfully managed the stress associated with fostering. All interviews were recorded, transcribed verbatim, and loaded into NVivo10 to prepare for analysis. A team of four researchers conducted the interviews and engaged in thematic analysis of the transcripts. To increase trustworthiness of the findings, several strategies were used including keeping an audit trail, reflexivity, peer debriefing, triangulation by observer, and member check. This presentation will provide an in-depth description of the methods and offers important implications regarding research methods used to examine complex social experiences such as family resilience that can be helpful in social work education. The following papers will offer implications stemming from the findings.