Exploring Family Change Processes: A Dynamic Qualitative Analysis of Family Trajectories, Change and Coordination in Child Protection Cases

This paper reports an exploratory discovery-oriented study aimed at inspecting change processes and dynamics in families referred by the Courts and Child Protection Services for family assessment in the Integrated Family Assessment and Intervention Model (IFAIM; Melo & Alarcao, 2011, 2013) due to child neglect. The families received support for change during an assessment aimed at facilitating and exploring their potential for change. The parents reported, in quantitative diaries, their family's experiences and changes inside and outside the sessions. We coded the data with a qualitative coding-scheme emergent from a preliminary qualitative exploration based on grounded theory methods and sensitizing concepts from Complexity Science and Dynamic Systems Theories. Core categories of Trajectories of States, Trajectories of Coordination and Influence and Other Coordination Effects emerged as relevant indicators to understand the families' potential for change, describing basic dynamic change processes and contributing to understand therapeutic outcomes. We discuss the implications of the results and directions for future studies. Keywords: Family Change Processes, Trajectories of Change, Potential for Family Change, Dynamic Systems, Child Protection The study of family change in family therapy is not new (Friedlander, Wildman, Heatherington, & Sknowron, 1994; Pinsof & Winne, 2000). Nevertheless, there remain questions regarding the processes and dynamics of change (Heatherington, Friedlander, & Greenberg, 2005). Psychotherapy researchers have identified common factors associated with therapeutic success (Duncan, Miller, Wampold, & Hubble, 2010). More recently, family researchers have explored specific factors in family therapy (Friedlander, Escudero, & Heatherington, 2006; Sprenkle, Davis, & Lebow, 2009). However, there is still much to understand regarding how these factors operate and by what mechanisms change happens (Carr, 2010). Traditional research methods are poorly equipped to capture the transformations in time that occur throughout therapeutic interventions, in particular the shape and specific contours of that change (Lanrenceau, Hayes, & Feldman, 2007). Comparing pre- and post-intervention states offers little or no information about how change unfolded and how that process itself may facilitate or inhibit change. It also tells us little about how that transformation is dependent on the initial conditions and the specific forms of the pathway. Path-dependency and sensitivity to initial conditions are, among others, distinctive properties of complex dynamical systems (Guastello & Liebovitch, 2009). Dynamic methodologies are designed to capture the shape of the transformations, through time, of a given variable or state of a system and to capture the rules that underlie such transformations. They are inspired in Complexity and Dynamic Systems Theories are particularly indicated (Valsiner, Molenaar, Lyra, & Chaudhary, 2009; Van Geert, 2012) to capture the processes underlying the family's transformations (Gottman, Murray, Swanson, Tyson, & Swanson, 2005) and their complexity. They have the potential to illuminate how different initial conditions and different contours of the dynamic behaviour of variables known to be of interest to therapeutic change may relate to different types of outcomes (Van Geert, 2012). Mathematical approaches grounded in dynamical systems theories have been used to explain the transformations occurring in many psychological and relational systems (Guastello, Koopmans, & Pincus, 2009). The work of John Gottman is paradigmatic of application of such techniques to couple' relational dynamics. Exploring the specific conditions that influence how a couple deals with conflict through time or responds to each other's influence has resulted in a body of highly significant information guiding intervention efforts (Gottmann & Gottman, 2008). …