Developing a Scale to Gauge Family Engagement in Child Welfare: The Family Engagement Practice Scale (FEPS)

Background: Among families involved in child welfare, increased family engagement is linked to better outcomes, including service utilization and completion, higher rates of reunification and fewer re-referrals. The Children’s Bureau defines family engagement as “a family-centered, strength-based approach to establishing and maintaining relationships with families and accomplishing change together.” Although the Children’s Bureau recently developed a family engagement inventory to capture dimensions and indicators of engagement, few measures have been developed or tested to assess engagement among child welfare practitioners. Researchers developed and piloted a Family Engagement Practices Scale (FEPS) to measure child welfare practitioner engagement of families.

Methods: This study is part of a multi-year, multisite study to improve outcomes for children in foster care in Texas. Researchers developed potential FEPS items based on family engagement literature, themes that emerged from focus groups with child welfare stakeholders conducted in 2019, and their own practice experiences. Potential FEPS items were reviewed by the project evaluation team and piloted on a statewide survey administered to child welfare practitioners and other stakeholders (e.g., lawyers, youth with lived experiences, foster parents, and birth parents) in Texas. A total N=133 stakeholders completed the survey, which included 11 negatively-worded FEPS items (e.g., “foster parents are afraid to work with birth parents”) and 14-positively-worded items (e.g., “caseworkers partner with birth parents to develop solutions to problems”). A principal component factor analysis was conducted using a Varimax rotation to identify factors and structure of the 25 items. Cronbach’s Alpha was calculated to identify internal reliability of the scale.

Results: Assumptions of adequate sample size, multivariate normality, and linearity for principal components and principal axis components factor analyses were met and satisfied, and Bartlett’s test of Sphericity for the EFA was statistically significant. Items with factor loadings under 0.40 and items that complexly loaded were deleted from the model. Six main factors were identified that explained 73.01% of the total variance. Twelve items on the positively-worded scale had factor loadings between 0.5-0.9 and only loaded onto one of the factors. Among the negatively-worded items, eight had factor loadings above 0.50 and did not complexly load. Thus, the final model included six subscales with a total of 20 items. Internal consistency was analyzed for each of the four factors and good reliability was observed (subscale 1 α =0.88; subscale 2 α=0.90; subscale 3 α=0.70; subscale 4 α=0.78; subscale 5 α=0.88; subscale 6 α=0.69).

Conclusion: This study developed and piloted the FEPS to measure family engagement practices among child welfare practitioners. Preliminary findings suggest that the FEPS six-factor scale presents good internal reliability, suggesting it is accurately measuring family engagement practices. Future research could conduct a confirmatory factor analysis with a larger sample and examine convergent and discriminant validity in order to make it more generalizable. As the larger project is rolled out over the next two years, the research team plans to build the evidence and validity for the FEPS so that it can be used as a measure of family engagement in other studies with child welfare populations.