EFFECTS OF INTENSIVE FAMILY BASED SERVICES
ON
PLACEMENTS, GOALS, PARENTING SKILLS AND MALTREATMENT REPORTS
JANET EICHHOLZ

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Effects of Intensive Family Based Services On Placements, Goals, Parenting Skills and Maltreatment Reports

Purpose of the Research
The purpose of this research project was to evaluate the Intensive Family Based Services (IFBS) program that serves North St. Louis County using already established program goals. Two of these goals were interpreted into measurable standards by stating these three research questions:
1. Have these families met their stated family goals?
2. What effect does IFBS have on substantiated maltreatment reports for children that have completed the program?
3. Have parents improved their parenting skills after completing the IFBS program? And one hypothesis:
4. There should be a change in the number of days of care in out-of-home placements for children completing the IFBS program.
Methodology
This evaluation was of quasi-experimental design using secondary data analysis. Univariate analysis was used to describe the saturation sample of the IFBS population and the services it received from the IFBS program. The saturation sample consisted of all the children that completed the IFBS program in 1995. This sample was used for analysis of goal attainment, parenting skills, maltreatment reports and out-of-home placements. For the maltreatment and the out-of-home placement analysis, a non-equivilant control group, made up of children in families who received Child Welfare services during an arbitrary period in 1995, was used- A two-tailed Analysis of Variance was used for out-of-home placement analysis. Chi-square was used in the analysis of maltreatment reports. A paired t-test was used for parenting skills, and descriptive and qualitative analysis was used to report goal attainment.
Results
Goal attainment: The responses on the client surveys indicate that most of the respondents thought things had improved in the family overall. Social worker goal assessment indicated that most to all family goals were met.
Parenting skills: 'Me responses on the client survey indicated that most clients felt their parenting skills had improved. According to the paired t-test there were no significant improvements in the parenting skills of those that completed the program.
Maltreatment: There was no difference in the changes in the rate of substantiated maltreatment reports between pre- and post treatment for children who have completed IFBS versus children who had received Child Welfare services.
Out-of-home placements: Children who complete IFBS had statistically significant fewer post treatment days in placement than Child Welfare children.
Discussion
The most impressive result of this analysis was that the number of days of post-treatment out-of-home placements for IFBS children was dramatically less than for Child Welfare children. Out-of-home placement rates have been a source of contrary research conclusions in the literature. Reducing out-of-home placements was a major goal for the EFBS program and this seems to have been achieved. IFBS effects on maltreatment reports seem to suggest that EFBS does not address maltreatment issues to the point of making any significant difference over Child Welfare services. There was also no significant improvement on parenting skills according to the paired t-test results, although parents seem to have responded favorably on the client surveys. Goal attainment was the vaguest outcome to measure simply because the secondary data was not very complete. Again, client feedback was positive on the client surveys.
Limitations
Because this evaluation used secondary data analysis, some of the measurements may not precisely reflect the outcome asked for in the research questions. This evaluation does not claim to be a complete or an all-inclusive evaluation of the IMS program. This evaluation did not look at the correlates of important issues such as race, economic status or geographic location. Because of its limited nature, this evaluation may be limited in its generalization to other populations. Recommendations
Developing better, more comprehensive goals, surveys and evaluation methods would make for a stronger study in the future.

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