Session: Redefining Parent Engagement in Child Welfare and Maltreatment Prevention Studies: A Future Direction in Engagement Research (Society for Social Work and Research 28th Annual Conference - Recentering & Democratizing Knowledge: The Next 30 Years of Social Work Science)

Parents play a crucial role in promoting the healthy development of children and youth. Engaging parents in programs in child welfare and maltreatment prevention settings can contribute to parents' capacity to create a nurturing environment where children and youth can thrive. The health and human services literature indicates that engagement is a multidimensional construct that encompasses the behavioral, attitudinal, and relational dimensions. However, engagement research has primarily focused on behavioral measures such as attendance, retention, completion, and compliance with data derived from the child welfare system or provider perspectives. Many studies have focused on examining relationships between these behavioral engagement measures and parent demographics with the goal of identifying hard-to-engage groups. However, these studies have provided limited insights into the strategies that might change engagement trajectories.

The purpose of this symposium is to promote child welfare research informed by the multidimensional model of parent engagement. In this symposium, we present three studies that examine parent engagement in foster care and child maltreatment prevention programs focusing on multiple engagement domains including behavioral, attitudinal, and relational dimensions. The first presentation reports the results from a scoping review of the literature on modifiable factors that influence parents' behavioral and attitudinal engagement in foster care. The second presentation synthesizes findings from qualitative studies that have explored parents' perspectives regarding their experiences in engaging with maltreatment prevention programs and recommended strategies to enhance engagement. The third and final presentation reports the results from a comprehensive scoping review of literature that examined parent' behavioral, attitudinal, and relational engagement in maltreatment prevention programs.

Participants will be invited to engage in discussions related to the importance of conducting research informed by the multidimensional model of parent engagement, contributions that such studies can make to further advancing the research and practice fields, and future directions in parent engagement research. For example, research in related fields has shown that attitudinal and relational engagement are important precursors to behavioral engagement as well as client outcomes. This implies that attitudinal and relational engagement may function as potential mechanisms to achieve an optimal level of behavioral engagement, which in turn can positively influence various well-being outcomes targeted by child welfare and prevention programs. Thus, research informed by the multidimensional model of engagement can promote mechanistic research within child welfare, i.e., studies of how and why programs achieve or do not achieve intended outcomes. Additionally, the results from these studies can inform the effort to develop and test targeted implementation strategies that can address specific engagement challenges among various subgroups of parents. Tailored implementation strategies can be developed to modify parents' attitudinal or relational engagement, which is more amenable to change compared to behavioral engagement. Such a shift can also lead to practice innovation by justifying the purposeful allocation of program resources to improve parent engagement. Finally, the shift toward multidimensional engagement research will necessitate incorporating parent perspectives into engagement studies thereby promoting stakeholder-engaged research within child welfare.