Peer Mentors in Child Welfare: A Qualitative Study

Background and Purpose: Families with co-occurring substance use and child abuse / neglect have complex needs. In response, a growing number of child welfare programs have incorporated peer mentors into their service delivery models. Peer mentors use personal recovery and child welfare experiences to help families navigate child welfare involvement, while also providing hope and motivation for recovery. Few studies have explored how teams with mentors collaborate in child welfare, though previous studies have suggested social workers who are attached to traditional models emphasizing professional expertise may feel threatened by mentors. The purpose of this study was to understand the experiences of mentors, social workers, and supervisors working through the Sobriety Treatment and Recovery Teams (START) program, a child welfare-based intervention delivering intensive services to families with co-occurring substance use and child abuse / neglect.

 

Methods: START team members (N = 22) were recruited via email from four counties in one Midwestern state. Social workers (n = 9), family mentors (n = 9), and supervisors (n = 4) completed recorded interviews by phone with the first author. Using a phenomenological lens, a semi-structured interview guide was used to elicit team members’ descriptions of their START implementation experiences. This collection method was combined with the analytic techniques of constructivist grounded theory, including open and focused coding. Peer de-briefing and consensus was used to solidify coding guidelines. Two authors applied focus codes to excerpts from 12 (54%) interview transcripts using Dedoose software. Using Dedoose’s inter-rater reliability test, these authors achieved a pooled Kappa of .90 and focused codes were then applied to the remaining interviews (n = 10). From these focus codes, analytic categories were developed and scrutinized using the constant comparison method. Respondent validation of results was elicited through both email and focus group discussions. 

 

Results: Three primary concepts were drawn from our analysis: describing a shared vision, developing team culture, and identifying benefits of the model. Describing a shared vision included identifying a common purpose in “keeping families together,” as well as comparing social worker/mentor model to other forms of child welfare practice. In developing team culture, members shared the unique challenges and opportunities inherent in their integrated teams, including the importance of open-mindedness in team decision-making, responding to the unique needs of each team member, and returning to a shared purpose when working through differences. Finally, team members shared their perspectives of model benefits which included stronger relationships with families, greater empathy toward individuals with substance use disorders, and an increase in job satisfaction relative to previous child welfare positions.

 

Implications: These results have implications for practitioners working at the intersection of child welfare and substance use, as well as other child welfare teams. In particular, they highlight the unique challenges and opportunities of integrating mentors into child welfare practice. Future research directions may include exploring how this integration may improve empathy and open-mindedness of social workers and supervisors, as these are known factors in successful engagement and team decision-making.